Summaries of George Orwell essays (under construction)

Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward
Draft version: version 6 (7 Oct Boys Weeklies added, 17 Sep Kostler added, 16 Sep, Wells added; 15 Sep 26; v2 10 Sep, v1 also 10 Sep, my comments in square brackets)
Note: a summary of Wollheim on Orwell as well.

Boys' weeklies (1940). Small newsagent shops (convenience stores) are common in poor quarters of a town. They have posters for newspapers The Daily Mail and The News of the World outside and the interior smells of liquorice and has lots of 2 penny papers. There are ones devoted to every hobby and pastime. (Porn? Refers also to Tit-bits and papers exploiting women's legs.) The contents of these shops are a guide to popular taste, better than the movies, because the film industry is almost a monopoly. Orwell will focus on boys' weeklies, also called penny dreadfuls: "Gem, Magnet, Modern Boy, Triumph and Champion, all owned by the Amalgamated Press, and the Wizard, Rover, Skipper, Hotspur,and Adventure, all owned by D.C. Thompson and Co." The Gem and Magnet were started 30 years ago, and can be treated as one, but Magnet features a first-rate character, Billy Bunter. The stories are about public schools lke Eton and Winchester. Says Bunter ranks with Sexton Blake, Tarzan, Sherlock Holmes, and a handful of Dickens characters. [Bunter largely unknown today though.] They are a fantasy of public school life, not like actual public schools. Orwell obliquely says, "Sex is completely taboo, especially in the form in which it actually arises in public schools." [Homosexual practices are rife?] All literature of this kind, Orwell declare, is partly plagiarism. Shameless appeal to snobbish values, such as boys with titles. Orwell says, "The most definite dividing line between the petite-bourgeoisie and the working class is that the former pay for their education, and within the bourgeoisie there is another unbridgeable gulf between the 'public' school and 'private' school." [In England, "public school" confusingly refers to certain old private schools - ones that require a fee to attend.] Who reads these? Orwell cannot say for sure, but he thinks public school boys stop at age 12 while those who attend cheap private schools read Gem and Magnet for several years beyond this. Orwell was a teacher at such a school and found the magazines widely read and taken seriously at ages 15 and 16. Both are much read  by girls and all over the British empire - Australians, Canadians, Jews, Malays, Arabs, Chinese. Strange letters are written in from people living a fantasy life - a boy specifies his height, weight, chest measurement,etc. and asks which boy he   resembles The stories feature ranked types of boy, such as the scholarship boy (from a poor home), the boy assistant, etc. The politics of these magazines are conservative in a pre-1914 nonfascist way. They assume nothing changes and that foreigners are funny. The working class feature as comics or villains. Orwell then turns to newer boys weeklies, which appeared since the Great War: Modern Boy, Triumph, Champion, Wizard, Rover, Skipper, Hotspur and Adventure. The stories are not written by one pperson and are technically superior. Instead of one long story, a number of the Wizard and Hotspur issues consist of 6. "Putting aside school stories", favourite subjects are Wild West, Frozen North, Foreign Legion, crime, the Greaat War, Tarzan-like stories, professional football, tropical exploration, historical romance (Robin Hood etc), and scientific invention. There is no leading character. American stories feature more blood and are more cynical; British stories uphold a moral code. There is, however, little progress away from conservative values. Snob appeal is slightly subtler. A school story still appears in each issue and its function is to make the boy goes to a cheaper private school feel it is as posh as Eton. The facts about working class life are still ignored. The women's papers are aimed at an older audience who work for a living and are more realistic. Sex, instead of being taboo, is the subject, writes Orwell. Story types include the heroine almost loses her boyfriend to a rival, a boy loses his job and must postpone marriage but then gets a better job. "The outlook inculcated by all these papers is that of a rather exceptionally stupid member of the Navy League in the year 1910." Orwell worries that fictions have a greater influence than it seems, especially fictions like these, read earlier in life. There are no left wing boys weeklies, but he thinks they are possible.

Wells, Hitler, and the World State (1941). Begins with some quotations from H.G. Wells, according to which the menace of Germany has been overstated: "our military 'experts' discuss the waiting phantom. In their imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible in discipline... The weeks pass and the phantom does none of these things—for one excellent reason. It does not exist to that extent." These words are from newspapers at the beginning of the year. Orwell's response: "Since they were written, the German army has overrun the Balkans and reconquered Cyrenaica, it can march through Turkey or Spain at such time as may suit it, and it has undertaken the invasion of Russia... So much for the idea that the German army is a bogey, its equipment inadequate, its morale breaking down, etc etc." Wells sticks to the values he has espoused (the gospel) for 40 years, supporting a world state, human rights, anti-totalitarianism. But now with "federal world control of air power." Orwell presses the question: how to get these. He says all sensible men for decades agree but have no power. [None named for us to look up, unfortunately. I would have agreed.] Orwell goes for an individual-focused history: "Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands." Unlike the Hitlerite, the hedonistic Wellsian type will not shed blood for his view. England has not failed in war and this is because of patriotism, [peculiarly] defined as "the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners." [Without the liberalism, what grounds for this feeling?] "The people who say that Hitler is Antichrist... are nearer an understanding of the truth than the intellectuals who for ten dreadful years have kept it up that he is merely a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously." "Only in the English-speaking countries was it fashionable to believe, right up to the outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made of cardboard." "Mr Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class." He hates fighting, hunting, and swashbuckling, we are told. "The principal villain of his Outline of History is the military adventurer, Napoleon." [Who's this written for, needs to be told N was that?] "On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses." [Should say professors of ancient Greek???!] Orwell says Germany eludes these oppositions: "Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far more barbarous." Science there is "in the service of ideas appropriate to the Stone Age." [Doesn't Orwell the humane nationalist share more common ground with extreme nationalists?] Wells was influential among youth, wonderful for a boy to read in the 1900s, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers. [Wasn't that the Belle Epoche, when everyone was happy?!] Wells wanted to fly! "Only, just the singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now." "because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was symbolised in his mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful forces than what he himself would describe as sanity." wells is too sane to understand; his novels lower middle class, sort-of ends Orwell.

The Art of Donald McGill (1941). Opens with: "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?" Donald McGill is his focus as the most prolific, the best, and the most representative. [This last quality which Orwell strangely clarifies as "the most perfect in the tradition."] His postcards "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." They are overpoweringly vulgar at first impression, owing to: ever present obscentity, hideous colours, the nature of the jokes, and grotesqueness of the drawings. "Your second impression, however, is of indefinable familiarity... 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." (Much later this is associated with Sancho Panza.) [What Orwell would say if you are the victim of such humour?] Presents some genuinely witty jokes, e.g. this dialogue [his example], " 'I like seeing experienced girls home.''But I'm not experienced!', 'You're not home yet!' " But in general the drawing is better than the words. More than half the jokes, maybe 3/4s, are sex jokes, foremostly about illegitimate babies. No mention of homosexuality though. Some conventions of the jokes: (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." Jokes about home life are second to sex jokes. [Isn't most sex in the home?] Some conventions: (i) "There is no such thing as a happy marriage"; (ii) "No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument"; (i - his numbering) "All drunken men have optical illusions"; (ii) "Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men. Drunken youths or women are never represented." There is also some toilet humour. Some 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." There is use of 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." After discussion of politics, Orwell returns the striking feature of obscenity. "A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic post cards is the woman with the stuck-out behind." We are told "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." [Wouldn't people who aspire to this degree of lack of romantic illusions use sex to sell?!] And "his brand of humour only has a meaning in relation to a fairly strict moral code." "So also with jokes about nagging wives and tyrannous mothers-in-law. They do at least imply a stable society in which marriage is indissoluble and family loyalty taken for granted." Goes on to say, "One of the few authentic class-differences, as opposed to class-distinctions, still existing in England is that the working classes age very much earlier. They do not live less long, provided that they survive their childhood, nor do they lose their physical activity earlier, but they do lose very early their youthful appearance." [Using a Marxist definition, no. What is going on with some early "agers" seems strange to me, as does Dolly Parton's later appearance!] Regarding Sancho Panza: this is his humour, he is body to Quixote's mind [isn't the depicted age of sexual attractiveness the result of observation and generalization, of mind], a stock figure in Western literature (Bloom to Stephen Daedalus, etc.); and "his point of view never gets a fair hearing. There is a constant world-wide conspiracy to pretend that he is not there, or at least that he doesn't matter. Codes of law and morals, or religious systems, never have much room in them for a humorous view of life." [Orwell's wizard-of-oz-like desire to be the one brilliant mind amongst philistines??? Anyway, this essay seems to partake in an earlier essayist trend for addressing humour: Bergson and then Beerbohm - opening alludes to the latter? Bergson does not offer a detailed classification when writing for the wider public, as one might expect from an academic, rather he sweepingly declares that we laugh when a human behaves mindlessly, like a machine. Orwell tries to pull off a readable version of what's missing, with his convention lists, and presents a bodycentric humour?]

Rudyard Kipling (1942, footnotes added 1945). "During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there." [Kipling's not that old.] Says, "It is no use pretending that Kipling's view of life, as a whole, can be accepted or even forgiven by any civilized person," something T.S. Eliot is criticized as more or less doing. [A Christian; Bible referred to later - Orwell is probably aware of this objection] "It is no use claiming, for instance, that when Kipling describes a British soldier beating a 'nigger' with a cleaning rod in order to get money out of him, he is acting merely as a reporter and does not necessarily approve what he describes." But denies Kipling was fascist. "There is no 'Law', there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with the age they are living in. Kipling's outlook is pre-fascist. He still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish hubris. He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their psychological results." [If not implying it is clearly true, why are the public deniers cowards?] "He was the prophet of British Imperialism in its expansionist phase (even more than his poems, his solitary novel, The Light that Failed, gives you the atmosphere of that time) and also the unofficial historian of the British Army, the old mercenary army which began to change its shape in 1914." Kipling's later life is spent sulking. "He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern." [Bizarre oversight!] "His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who despises the 'box-wallah' and often lives a lifetime without realizing that the 'box-wallah' calls the tune." "But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which 'enlightened' people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility." "he had grown up with a brilliant mind in mainly philistine surroundings" [Orwell's preference for himself? himself and his readers?] "Kipling's is the only literary picture that we possess of nineteenth-century Anglo-India". Was he a publicity agent for Cecil Rhodes?! The service middle class, finding he was on their side, put him on a pedastal. Kipling anti-working class: "Kipling idealizes the army officer, especially the junior officer, and that to an idiotic extent, but the private soldier, though lovable and romantic, has to be a comic. He is always made to speak in a sort of stylized Cockney, not very broad but with all the aitches and final "g's" carefully omitted." "Yet it remains true that he has far more interest in the common soldier, far more anxiety that he shall get a fair deal, than most of the 'liberals' of his day or our own." "Civilized men do not readily move away from the centres of civilization, and in most languages there is a great dearth of what one might call colonial literature."  Says Kipling's poetry can be improved, made less facetious, by replacing Cockney with standard English. "Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language." East is East and West is West! The white man's burden. The female of the species is more deadly than the male! What do they know of England who only England know! "Kipling deals in thoughts which are both vulgar and permanent. This raises the question of his special status as a poet, or verse-writer." [Orwell's preferred combination: vulgar and permanent?] Regarding Eliot's review, "Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able to speak plainly." [Preferred combination for just about anyone who thinks anything today?!] Orwell describes a taste for Kipling as like a taste in cheap sweets. Orwell makes a list of Good Bad Poems in English, all post-1790, sentimental yet giving pleasure to people of refined taste: 'The Bridge of Sighs', 'When all the world is young, lad', 'The Charge of the Light Brigade', Bret Harte's 'Dickens in Camp', 'The Burial of Sir John Moore', 'Jenny Kissed Me', 'Keith of Ravelston', 'Casabianca'. Good poetry, in our age, is "the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts." The very word "poetry" evokes a hostile snigger. [No, except amongst intellectuals who read lots but with massive inferiority issues???] Good bad poems exist because of overlap between intellectual and masses. "A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious." A mess of different clarifications follows: emotions all have, emotions which are true, thoughts all have even if not true. "Kipling sold out to the British governing class, not financially but emotionally."

Arthur Koestler (1944). Opening paragraph tells us 20th century English literature has been dominated by foreigners, for example, Conrad, Henry James, Shaw, Joyce, Yeats, Pound and Eliot. But it has done well in pamphleteering, which Orwell defines in an obviously objectionable way: "I mean the special class of literature that has arisen out of the European political struggle since the rise of Fascism." [Don't compare it with non-European antifascist lit or even antidemocracy lit: that is something else entirely?] Then surprisingly identifies a series of foreigners excelling in that: Silone, Malraux, Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koestler. The essay is mostly an assessment of Koestler's English language books, a Hungarian who wrote about totalitarianism from within. [Whom Orwell eclipsed for wider readers, despite less acquiantance with such society, owing to greater "iconicity" skills. "I come to bury Koestler"? Only for Kundera to emerge.] on "Spanish Testament": "In the prison scenes Koestler successfully establishes the nightmare atmosphere which is, so to speak, his patent, but the rest of the book is too much coloured by the Popular Front orthodoxy of the time. One or two passages even look as though they had been doctored for the purposes of the Left Book Club." No details given. "The Gladiators.. is about Spartacus, the Thracian gladiator who raised a slaves' rebellion in Italy round about 65 BC." Orwell says that the present and future are too terrifying to think oneself into this perspective and Koestler's Spartacus is "a modern man dressed up." Rebellious slaves set out to build a just society: "no slavery, no hunger, no injustice, no floggings, no executions." Spartacus is an allegory of the proletarian dictator. It goes wrong, but Orwell is very sketchy as to why: "The turning-point comes when Spartacus finds himself obliged to crucify twenty of his oldest and most faithful followers. After that the City of the Sun is doomed, the slaves split up and are defeated in detail, the last fifteen thousand of them being captured and crucified in one batch." The weakness of the book is that the motives of Spartacus are unclear: he is neither visionary nor powerhungry and yet enters the means-ends dilemma of "You can achieve nothing unless you are willing to use force and cunning, but in using them you pervert your original aims." Koestler's masterpiece is Darkness at Noon. It deals with "an Old Bolshevik, Rubashov, who first denies and ultimately confesses to crimes which he is well aware he has not committed." Orwell's Koestler avoids the obvious explanation of Rubashov's being tortured into confession. "Rubashov ultimately confesses because he cannot find in his own mind any reason for not doing so... For decades he has been simply the creature of the Party, and what the Party now demands is that he shall confess to non-existent crimes. In the end, though he had to be bullied and weakened first, he is somewhat proud of his decision to confess." "Rubashov belongs to the older generation of Bolsheviks that was largely wiped out in the purges. He is aware of art and literature, and of the world outside Russia... His superiority to the other is finally traceable to his bourgeois origin." Orwell says that any answer to why there were confessions in the Moscow trials is a political decision. [By which he seems to mean that inquiry into why is already value-laden, already assumes, say, that this is an unacceptable regime.] "Scum of the Earth" is autobiography: "The book is a valuable piece of reportage, and together with a few other scraps of honest writing... it is a reminder of the depths that bourgeois democracy can descend to." [Names of other honest writing please?] Koestler was imprisoned in France at the outbreak of war and then, with its collapse, escaped to England, only to be imprisoned as a member of the enemy. "Arrival and Departure" is described as a tract thinly veiled as a novel: "purporting to show that revolutionary creeds are rationalisations of neurotic impulses." The psychoanalyst extracts that the main character's "revolutionary enthusiasm is not founded on any real belief in historical necessity, but on a morbid guilt complex arising from an attempt in early childhood to blind his baby brother." Orwell counters: "Those who struggle against society are, on the whole, those who have reason to dislike it, and normal healthy people are no more attracted by violence and illegality than they are by war." [A former Eton boy unfamiliar with the view that war is part of the human condition and a spiritual good in itself? See Broad 1931 and Parfit 2011.] Says, "from his European angle he can see such things as purges and mass deportations for what they are; he is not, like Shaw or Laski, looking at them through the wrong end of the telescope." Says Arrival and Failure is shallow compared to earlier work because it overlooks that although all revolutions are failures, they are not the same failure. [Orwell's anti-totalitairian fictions suggest he thinks Koestler's chief weakness is not knowing how to commmunicate his knowledge by means of more iconic fiction - louder, louder, louder!]
Add Broad and Parfit references (and Shakespeare's Julius Caesar).

Benefit of Clergy: Some notes on Salvador Dali (1944). Orwell opens with bald assertions: "Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats." He presents some episodes from Dali's life story: "which are imaginary hardly matters: the point is that this is the kind of thing that Dali would have liked to do." This anecdote is quoted: as a child, Dali is rushing to observe Haley's comet; his 3 year old sister is crawing in the doorway; Dali kicks her in the head, as if it were a ball, and feels joy.  Other stories are presented. "During the Spanish Civil War he astutely avoids taking sides, and makes a trip to Italy. He feels himself more and more drawn towards the aristocracy, frequents smart salons, finds himself wealthy patron". Orwell asserts: "from his Surrealist paintings and photographs the two things that stand our are sexual perversity and necrophilia." And ironically: "Dali also boasts that he is not homosexual, but otherwise he seems to have as good an outfit of perversions as anyone could wish for." Orwell's overall assessment of Dali's autiobiography: "It is a book that stinks. If it were possible for a book to give a physical stink off its pages, this one would" Orwell continues the character assasination: "The point is that you have here a direct, unmistakable assault on sanity and decency; and even - since some of Dali's pictures would tend to poison the imagination like a pornographic postcard - on life itself. What Dali has done and what he has imagined is debatable, but in his outlook, his character, the bedrock decency of a human being does not exist. He is as anti-social as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it." [Alternative view: if a genuinely talented genuinely perverse character appears, Dali does what they do and conveys, "We don't need the real thing, okay."] Orwell describes the time as one of highbrow baiting, which it seems he wants to distinguish himself from: "Witness the renewed highbrow-baiting that is now going on in this country and America, with its outcry not only against Joyce, Proust and Lawrence, but even against T. S. Eliot" [How different is Orwell??] "But if you talk to the kind of person who can see Dali's merits, the response that you get is not as a rule very much better. If you say that Dali, though a brilliant draughtsman, is a dirty little scoundrel, you are looked upon as a savage." And "the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people." Orwell's conclusion: "One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being." [Yes, he seems good at drawing to me too, but what's the expert view, regarding how good he is in this competitive field? And can you tell us: any good as writer? Is this how specialization is maintained?!]  Orwell describes Dali as clearly diseased. Then tries to figure out what he really is! "Take away the skulls, ants, lobsters, telephones and other paraphernalia, and every now and again you are back in the world of Barrie, Rackham, Dunsany and Where the Rainbow Ends." "This is the old-fashioned, over-ornate Edwardian style of drawing to which Dali tends to revert when he is not being Surrealist." Orwell says some of the writing also reminds one of this period; the sister kicking anecdote reminds him of "Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes, by Harry Graham." Poor little Willy is crying so sore/ A sad little boy is he/ For he's broken his little sister's neck / And he'll have no jam for tea. Says "perhaps these things are also there because Dali can't help drawing that kind of thing because it is to that period and that style of drawing that he really belongs." [You have to erase a lot of stuff to argue for that and take supposedly unconscious drawing preferences to be the real Dali. Foreign art has a different relation to what is past and future in UK anyway, e.g. some is a collective focus which "we" regard as for historians now?]
Jonathan Jones in The Guardian says Orwell was not reactionary, but troubled by Dali flirting with pro-Franco views. Orwell presents himself as totally antiDali, apart from his drawing skill - has everything in common with reactionaries except demanding censorship?! ("Yes, don't censor it, but leave it to psychiatrists.") Under his management, Dali would stick to ornate antique pieces ("At least you are being yourself then, Salvador!") - even the common man /woman of today likes his melting clocks? For Jones' article, see:
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2009/jun/09/george-orwell-art-critic-salvador-dali
From me, see (not accepted by PhilPapers): https://www.instagram.com/p/Dcylv_2gHoA/     ("How to react to the critical talk of philosophers")
And: https://philpapers.org/rec/EDWOTV-4    ("On the very idea that social anthropology can contribute to the study of specialization")

Raffles and Miss Blandish (1944, footnotes added 1945). Orwell contrasts the earlier English criminal novels featuring the character Raffles and James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Despite almost 50 years, Raffles is well-known amongst the English public apparently. He plays cricket and burgles posh houses, Mayfair houses where he is a guest. Raffles is not an honest man who has gone astray, he is a former public school boy (a confusing English term for a renowned type of private school) who has gone astray. He doesn't strongly feel stealing is wrong and Orwell interestingly remarks, "the moral code of most of us is still so close to Raffles' own that we do feel his situation to be an especially ironical one". Orwell comments on Raffles association with cricket. "Cricket is not in reality a very popular game in England—it is nowhere so popular as football, for instance—but it gives expression to a well-marked trait in the English character, the tendency to value 'form' or 'style' more highly than success." [Is this a very small part of the English population and especially a part that does not often preoccupy Orwell: it is not the stereotypical English working class, who does not go in for the flashily stylized? Also Shakespeare is famous for a wild ignoring of neat form.] We are told, "Raffles, however, is of upper-middle-class origin and is only accepted by the aristocracy because of his personal charm." Orwell says, "Raffles and Bunny... have no real ethical code, merely certain rules of behaviour which they observe semi-instinctively." But then confusingly says, "He will commit a burglary in a house where he is staying as a guest, but the victim must be a fellow-guest and not the host. He will not commit murder [Note, below], and he avoids violence wherever possible and prefers to carry out his robberies unarmed. He regards friendship as sacred, and is chivalrous though not moral in his relations with women. He will take extra risks in the name of 'sportsmanship', and sometimes even for aesthetic reasons. And above all, he is intensively patriotic." [Sounds like an ethical code! A caddish formula for winning hearts? The footnote reports one killing.] Orwell summarizes the plot of Chase's much more recent novel. Miss Blandish, daughter of a millionaire, is kidnapped by one gang and then another, holding her to ransom. A member called Slim drives knives into people's bellies and suffers from impotence. His mother is the brains of the gang and tries to cure his impotence by means of encouraging the rape of Miss Blandish. After many efforts, this is achieved. She is rescued but has now developed an attachment to Slim's caresses and kills herself, unable to live without him. The plot resembles William Faulkner's Sanctuary; the atmosphere does not. Orwell notes that violence and gory detail are now normal in American literature, and the reader is assumed to be sophicated in their sexual knowledge, e.g. having knowledge of sadistic and masochistic tendencies. Quite a few American pulp fictions are directed at sadists and masochists Orwell tells us, but they are not pornography in an ordinary sense: "Unlike most  books that deal in sexual sadism, it lays the emphasis on the cruelty and not on the pleasure." British imitations are said to be impoverished compared to the original American pulp fiction crime novel. However, he believes Chase has not been to America yet excelled in using Americanized language and in crafting the novel in general. (Orwell finds that he is the first to also identify a sadistic and masochistic element in Bernard Shaw's work and connects it to his admiration for dicators. [How did this remark even get into this essay?]) Orwell has been told by several that Chase's novel is pure fascism, to which he responds: "It has merely the same relation to Fascism as, say Trollope's novels have to nineteenth-century capitalism. It is a daydream appropriate to a totalitarian age." [Orwell's main questions seem to be: is Americanization a problem? is this novel fascism? is this pornography?]

Good Bad Books (1945). "A type of  book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called "the good bad book": that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished. Obviously outstanding  books in this line are Raffles and the Sherlock Holmes stories..." [Raffles? What's that?] Orwell adds that R. Austin Freedman's earlier stories "The Singing Bone" and "The Eye of Osiris", Ernest Bramah's Max Carrados are almost as good, and Guy Boothby's Tibetan thriller Dr Nikola a bit worse. Refers to humorists too: E. Nesbit (The Treasure Seekers), George Birmingham "who was good so long as he kept off politics", the Binstead (“Pitcher” of the pink 'un, pornographic though); Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories; Barry Pain's The Octave of Claudius; Peter Blundell, "who wrote in the W.W. Jacobs vein about Far Eastern seaport towns" and was praised by H.G. Wells. These are all entertainments. There are also natural novels, not good by any literary standard, but "attain sincerity partly because they are not inhibited by good taste": Leonard Merrick (Cynthia), W. L. George (Caliban), J. D. Beresford (A Candidate for Truth), Ernest Raymond (We, The Accused, May Sinclair (The Combined Maze), and, at a lower level, A. S. M. Hutchinson. [Some of these were reviewed as literary works in a prestigious sense, in modernist review the Egoist no less.] Says "intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as it would be to a music-hall comedian." [What???] Turning to 19th century, "Carlyle would be found to be a more intelligent man than Trollope. Yet Trollope has remained readable and Carlyle has not: with all his cleverness he had not even the wit to write in plain straightforward English." Turning to modernism: "Enough talent to set up dozens of ordinary writers has been poured into Wyndham Lewis's so-called novels, such as Tarr or Snooty baronet. Yet it would be a very heavy labour to read one of these  books right through. Some indefinable quality, a sort of literary vitamin, which exists even in a book like If winter comes, is absent from them." Says "Perhaps the supreme example of the "good bad" book is Uncle Tom's cabin. It is an unintentionally ludicrous book, full of preposterous melodramatic incidents; it is also deeply moving and essentially true; it is hard to say which quality outweighs the other." Asks: it is serious in intent; what about escapist literature, e.g. Sherlock Holmes, Vice Versa, Dracula, Helen's babies or King Solomon's mines? [Remark on that earlier please?! What about the structure of this essay?] Declares the music hall poems better than 3/4s of what gets into anthologies, e.g. "Come where the booze is cheaper / Come where the pots hold more /Come where the boss is a bit of a sport / Come to the pub next door!" [Bizarre preference; the other poem quoted is better, if realistic: "Two lovely black eyes / Oh, what a surprise! / Only for calling another man wrong / Two lovely black eyes"] Says he would have rather written these than "The Blessed Damozel" or "Love in the Valley". And that he would bet Uncle Tom's Cabin will outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf or George Moore. [Orwell's literary tastes require all recent literary experiments to start off accessible, rather than going mainstream later?]
ADD HOW ORCHIDS GOT IN TROUBLE.

Antisemitism in Britain (1945). Starts with some facts: 400000 known Jews in Britain; also 1000s of refugees entered the country from 1934; almost entirely concentrated in 6 big towns;  "Of the big monopolies, such as the I.C.I., one or two leading newspapers and at least one big chain of department stores are Jewish-owned or partly Jewish-owned," but false to say British business life is dominated by Jews; " The Jews seem, on the contrary, to have failed to keep up with the modern tendency towards big amalgamations and to have remained fixed in those trades which are necessarily carried out on a small scale and by old-fashioned methods." [Looking back: the antisemite is right about general direction of success, even if facts then said no.] There is no Jewish problem, only some Jewish influence in intellectual circles. But antisemitism is rising [Orwell later, um, contradicts this claim of his] and humane people are not immune to it. [Well, consider Orwell's definition of being human!] Quotes ironic remarks about being of the Chosen Race. From the remarks Orwell infers: "Above a certain intellectual level people are ashamed of being antisemitic and are careful to draw a distinction between 'antisemitism' and 'disliking Jews'"; and "The Jews are accused of specific offences (for instance, bad behaviour in food queues)... but it is obvious that these accusations merely rationalize some deep-rooted prejudice." [It takes me ages to think like so.] "If you dislike somebody, you dislike him and there is an end of it: your feelings are not made any better by a recital of his virtues." [I have learnt to prefer my father in some situations!]  "Jews are to be found in exactly those trades which are bound to incur unpopularity with the civilian public in war-time. Jews are mostly concerned with selling food, clothes, furniture and tobacco – exactly the commodities of which there is a chronic shortage, with consequent overcharging, black-marketing and favouritism. And again, the common charge that Jews behave in an exceptionally cowardly way during air raids was given a certain amount of colour by the big raids of 1940. As it happened, the Jewish quarter of Whitechapel was one of the first areas to be heavily blitzed, with the natural result that swarms of Jewish refugees distributed themselves all over London." [Bravery won't help!] But Orwell denies even quasi-rationality, given that people believe false anti-Semitic stories. "Among educated people, antisemitism is held to be an unforgivable sin and in a quite different category from other kinds of racial prejudice." [Puzzle.] "After 1934 the ‘Jew joke’ disappeared as though by magic from postcards, periodicals and the music-hall stage, and to put an unsympathetic Jewish character into a novel or short story came to be regarded as antisemitism. On the Palestine issue, too, it was de rigueur among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid examining the claims of the Arabs – a decision which might be correct on its own merits, but which was adopted primarily because the Jews were in trouble and it was felt that one must not criticize them." Orwell feels the atmosphere since the rise of Hitler prevents scientific study of antisemitism. "though antisemitism is sufficiently in evidence now, it is probably less prevalent in England than it was thirty years ago." 30 years ago: Jew was regarded superior in intelligence, deficient in character. "Wealthy Jews tended to disguise themselves under aristocratic English or Scottish names, and to the average person it seemed quite natural that they should do this, just as it seems natural for a criminal to change his identity if possible." (Interesting story: boy from Colombo and Orwell.) "the 'Jew joke' of the music halls and the comic papers was almost consistently ill-natured. There was also literary Jew-baiting, which in the hands of Belloc, Chesterton and their followers reached an almost continental level of scurrility." Chesteron was hihgly respected, says Orwell. [Not exactly, from reading A.A. Gardiner] Orwell thinks of passages if written now which would be regarded as antisemitic: in the works of Shakespeare [whole play!], Smollett, Thackeray, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley. Those who defend: Dickens and Charles Reade. "If, as I suggest, prejudice against Jews has always been pretty widespread in England, there is no reason to think that Hitler has genuinely diminished it. He has merely caused a sharp division between the politically conscious person who realizes that this is not a time to throw stones at the Jews, and the unconscious person whose native antisemitism is increased by the nervous strain of the war." "With some plausibility it can be said that the Jews are the enemies of our native culture and our national morale. Carefully examined, the claim is seen to be nonsense." [Where is the initial plausibility from?]. "The two current explanations [for antisemitism origins], that it is due to economic causes, or on the other hand, that it is a legacy from the Middle Ages, seem to me unsatisfactory,  though I admit that if one combines them they can be made to cover the facts." "many Zionist Jews seem to me to be merely antisemites turned upside-down, just as many Indians and Negroes display the normal colour prejudices in an inverted form."  Final sentence: "that antisemitism will be definitively cured, without curing the larger disease of nationalism, I do not believe."

Why I Write (1946). Orwell says he knew he would be a writer from age 5 or 6, and from 17-24 he tried to abandon the plan, but conscious of going against his own nature! He was a lonely child. " 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." At 14, he "wrote a whole rhyming play, in imitation of Aristophanes, in about a week". He gives this information because knowledge of early development is essential to assessing a writer's motives. He specified 4 main motives for writing prose. (1) "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." [These are quite different to me, though with overlaps.] He tells us, "The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish" - this sheer egoism belongs to scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen. (2) Aesthetic enthusiasm. "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." (3) "Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity." [Weak in Orwell, it seems to me!] (4) "Political purpose... Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples' idea of the kind of society that they should strive after." [Some people probably write from a kind of duty to ensure that a field belongs to our people. "My father was a newspaper man and I am too, not that I like it: to block you outsiders from having a chance, from getting this kind of job." Sort-of relatedly, "Son, why don't you become a writer like me. At least it is a business we know.") He says that by nature "I am a person in whom the first three motives would outweigh the fourth. In a peaceful age I might have written ornate or merely descriptive books, and might have remained almost unaware of my political loyalties. As it is I have been forced into becoming a sort of pamphleteer." Says that after the Spanish civil war and other events, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, AGAINST totalitarianism and FOR democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects." About his book on the Spanish civil war: " I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts." He tells us, "All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness." [I almost wrote a novel without meaning to, starting in the coronavirus lockdown. I longed to read a certain write - no Internet at home then - and spun out some imitations and thye kept going! It was then I realized a novel is not such an impressive thing!]

Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool (1947). Summarizes and responds to a pamphlet by Lev/Leo Tolstoy opposing the high status of William Shakespeare. Orwell's summary summarized here. Tolstoy says that Shakespeare is not only less than a genius, he is below an average author. He focuses on the much-praised King Lear. Lear is stupid, full of incredible events, and unfunny jokes. It plagiarizes a better play. Shakespeare is said to have technical skill owing to his acting career, but fails at "delineating character or of making words, and actions spring naturally out of situations." The language is unrealistic and he puts his own thoughts into any character at hand. And his opinions are not original or interesting. Tolstoy reasserts his theory of art as requiring dignity of subject matter (something important to mankind), sincerity, and good craftsmanship. Orwell asks, how did the Shakespeare Tolstoy describes come to be so admired? Tolstoy regards Shakespeare's reputation as originating in promotion by German professors at the end of the 18th century. They found in him "a good exposition of their own attitude to life" and an alternative to frigid and artificial French classical literature. Germans critics parroted Goethe's praise. Orwell says that no argument can establish a writer good or bad [even to those with shared values?] and survival is the only test of literary merit, a majority opinion test. Artistic theories are worthless, because they depend on vague terms, e.g. "sincere", "important". [Is "sincere" vague? A person is sincere if, when they present themselves as believing X, they actually do.] Orwell says Tolstoy uses many weak and dishonest arguments. Orwell attacks Tolstoy's claim to impartiality, by citing Tolstoy introducing Lear's speech with Cordelia dead in his arms: "Again begin Lear's awful ravings, at which one feels ashamed, as at unsuccessful jokes." Tolstoy is said to alter the plot, e.g. saying that Lear has no reason for abdictating though a reason is given in scene 1. Orwell suddenly returns the problem of explaining how Shakespeare became so admired. And then adds another criticism: "various of his accusations contradict one another: for example, Shakespeare is a mere entertainer and "not in earnest", but on the other hand he is constantly putting his own thoughts into the mouths of his characters." [What's the contradiction? His thoughts may be entertaining.] Orwell declares it impossible that Tolstoy believes what he is saying: that the civilized world has been deluded in its Shakespeare appreciation. [Why?] Orwell plans to guess at Tolstoy's real reasons for disliking Shakespeare, which is certainly real he assures us. [If Tolstoy is giving sham reasons, why think he embraces the conclusion or genuinely dislikes?] But Orwell agrees to some extent: "Tolstoy is right in saying that Lear is not a very good play, as a play. It is too drawn-out and has too many characters and sub-plots. One wicked daughter would have been quite enough". Orwell continues with disagreements before presenting his guess [can they not be in one place]. He disagrees with Tolstoy on the fool: "Tolstoy sees no justification for the presence of the Fool. The Fool is integral to the play. He acts not only as a sort of chorus", also as a challenge to Lear's high-minded follly. Orwell also disagrees with Tolstoy's emphasis on stagecraft as crucial to Shakespeare's success: "Several of the plays which are most valued by lovers of Shakespeare (for instance, Timon of Athens) are seldom or never acted, while some of the most actable, such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, are the least admired." Orwell says Tolstoy dislikes a sort of exuberace, which he strangely clarifies as an interest in the actual processes of life, rather than pleasure in them. Tolstoy is said to favour parables presentable in any or almost any language. Orwell criticizes Tolstoy as willfully blind, because King Lear has a [dignified] subject: renunciation. Lear's rage when people no longer obey him is in character, contrary to Tolstoy's charge of unnaturalness. But for Orwell, the music of Shakespeare's English is crucial to explaining his success in England, not dignity of theme. Anyway, Orwell's guess seems to be that Tolstoy consciously or unconsciously saw himself in the depiction of Lear and disliked this representation of himself. "In his old age, he [Tolstoy] renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights, and made an attempt-a sincere attempt, though it was not successful-to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant." We are told: "Tolstoy was not a saint, but he tried very hard to make himself into a saint, and the standards he applied to literature were other-worldly ones. It is important to realize that the difference between a saint and an ordinary human being is a difference of kind and not of degree. That is, the one is not to be regarded as an imperfect form of the other. The saint, at any rate Tolstoy's kind of saint, is not trying to work an improvement in earthly life: he is trying to bring it to an end and put something different in its place." Shakespeare in contrast is not even trying: "he was a human being, and in some ways not a very good one. It is clear, for instance, that he liked to stand well with the rich and powerful, and was capable of flattering them in the most servile way." [Tolstoy expressed dislike of Shakespeare before he was renouncing-old-man. The obvious explanation for why Tolstoy dislikes Shakespeare is a severe contrast of temperaments or values: chalk and cheese, as the English say! Is this an exercise in how much success/readability one can achieve while breaking with essay structure expectations and indulging in dodgy psychological speculation???] Declares Tolstoy as essayist would never survive without his novels, despite referring to Hazlitt earlier.

Reflections on Ghandi (1949). Opens with "Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent". Says these are the questions one is inclined to ask: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity-by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power-and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? [They seem the questions of someone overly preoccupied with a person's character. I would ask: to what extent was Indian independence inevitable - if not Ghandi, someone else does the job?] Orwell claims Ghandi he has never been able to like Ghandi. Says as a nationalist, he was strictly speaking, an enemy of the British but they and various others founds him useful. He was anti-violence which meant he was anti any effective action, Orwell continues. "The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away." The high standards applied when judging him lead us to overlook various virtues: "his natural physical courage was quite outstanding: the manner of his death was a later illustration of this, for a public man who attached any value to his own skin would have been more adequately guarded"; "quite free from that maniacal suspiciousness which, as E.M. Forster rightly says in A Passage to India, is the besetting Indian vice, as hypocrisy is the British vice"; "he was not afflicted by envy or by the feeling of inferiority"; "Even when he was fighting what was in effect a color war, he did not think of people in terms of race or status." Orwell says Ghandi's autobiography is not a literary masterpiece, but provides useful information about his youth. "Gandhi started out with the normal ambitions of a young Indian student and only adopted his extremist opinions by degrees and, in some cases, rather unwillingly. There was a time, it is interesting to learn, when he wore a top hat, took dancing lessons, studied French and Latin, went up the Eiffel Tower and even tried to learn the violin—all this was the idea of assimilating European civilization as thoroughly as possible. He was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries." Orwell finds his misdeeds minimal: "A few cigarettes, a few mouthfuls of meat, a few annas pilfered in childhood from the maidservant, two visits to a brothel (on each occasion he got away without "doing anything"), one narrowly escaped lapse with his landlady in Plymouth, one outburst of temper". "Underneath his less ordinary qualities one feels all the time the solid middle-class businessmen who were his ancestors. One feels that even after he had abandoned personal ambition he must have been a resourceful, energetic lawyer and a hard-headed political organizer, careful in keeping down expenses, an adroit handler of committees and an indefatigable chaser of subscriptions." Orwell pursues a question not earlier listed: is Ghandi an important part of left wing Western politics? "Gandhi's teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things and that our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have. They make sense only on the assumption that God exists". [Man is the measure of all things is explicitly an expression of moral relativism normally, not socialism.] Lists Ghandi's recommendations: "no meat-eating, and if possible no animal food in any form"; "o alcohol or tobacco, and no spices or condiments even of a vegetable kind, since food should be taken not for its own sake but solely in order to preserve one's strength"; "If sexual intercourse must happen, then it should be for the sole purpose of begetting children and presumably at long intervals"; no close friendships or exclusive loves. Orwell finds this inhuman: "The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals." [The classic texts of British liberalism give considerable weight to self-interested types without loyalities! Also should Orwell be so involved with assessing foreign writers, given what is "human" for him???] Orwell attributes the assumption "that all human beings are more or less approachable and will respond to a generous gesture... It is not necessarily true, for example, when you are dealing with lunatics. Then the question becomes: Who is sane? Was Hitler sane?" Ends bizarrely with: " Gandhi's basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded simply as a politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!" 
For loyalty and philosophy, see Bernard Williams and Michael Sandel (same definition of being human as Orwell?).

Orwell Reconsidered by Richard Wollheim. Says Orwell will probably be remembered for ideas in his books, but they were taken from others. Early on makes some remarks on method, in The Road to Wigan Pier, main focus. "Whether he is writing about the condition of the worlking classes in the 1930s (as in the first part of the book) or about the predicament of socialism and socialists (as in the second part), his method is the same. In each case, what he does is to pick out from the material at his disposal a number of details all of them as startling, as shocking, as arresting as possible, and then to set them down in a style that is very deliberately and very self-consciously none of these things. The method is undoubtedly effective... But the method has also its defects, and the most important of these is that it tends to distortion." "when Orwell tells us something about what his working-class people think or feel--and it is amazing how rarely he refers to anything except the physical terms of their life--he does so in a way that is striking but external: he reminds one forcefully that it is a necessary truth that one can only ever see the surface of things." [Amongst people one knows well, or individuals, one can be reasonably confident of anger, upset, joy??] "The Road to Wigan Pier is not just journalism but also out-of-date journalism." "In Orwell's England there were two million unemployed: in June 1958 there were 472000..." We are much later told: "The book was written, we must remember, in an epoch when it was held all literature should aspire to the condition of journalism." Orwell is generally depicted as a child of his age. The merit of the book "resides in the question that it raises and round which, in its fluid way, the book is centred... What is it really to be a socialist?" Wollheim distinguishes: what is it to be X and what is a good X? Orwell in the Indian Imperial Police felt he was sustaining a system of oppression and left after 5 years, unable to bear the role. In England, he felt he was also part of a system of oppression: one that oppresses the working classes. "The question then arose for Orwell. How could he contract out of the second system as he had out of the first?" The sensible answer, Wollheim supposes, is "There is no single action or set of actions that counts as countracting out of the capitalist system... And that is because capitalism is a pervasive sysem in a way which imperialism isn't." [Don't the comforts of the capitalist West anyway depend on exploitation of others, by imperialism or something successor system???] Wollheim responds interestingly to a quotation in which Orwell says that it is not the radio, the novels published, Ascot, Eton versus Harrow, but "the memory of working-class interiors... that reminds me that our age has not been altogether a bad one to live in." Orwell offers no evidence to support the championing of working class culture over other aspects of English life - it seems crude sentimentalism. Also there is difficulty "reconciling it with his socialism. For if working-class culture is all that superior, it is hard to see why it ought not to be retained: yet, equally, it is hard to see how it can be retained, if one abolished the material conditions on which it must to some extent at least depend."
Reference. Richard Wollheim. 1960. Orwell Reconsidered. Partisan Review 27(1).