Status Updates From Essays

Broadly speaking, Communist propaganda depends upon terrifying people with the (quite real) horrors of Fascism. It also involves pretending—not in so many words, but by implication—that Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, "mass sadism", the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs.

In the first half of this article I suggested that the real struggle in.Spain, on the Government side, has been between revolution and counter-revolution; that the Government, though anxious enough to avoid being beaten by Franco, has been even more anxious to undo the revolutionary changes with which the outbreak of war was accompanied.

The peasant and the worker hate feudalism and clericalism ; but so does the "liberal" bourgeois, who is not in the least opposed to a more modem version of Fascism, at least so long as it isn't called Fascism. The "liberal" bourgeois is genuinely liberal up to the point where his own interests stop. He stands for the degree of progress implied in the phrase "la carriere ouverte aux talents".

It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force ; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies.

The basic trouble with all orthodox Marxists is that, possessing a system which appears to explain everything, they never bother to discover what is going on inside other people's heads. That is why in every western country, during the last dozen years, they have played straight into the hands of their adversaries.

Hence the frightful intellectual dishonesty which can be observed in nearly all propagandist critics. They are employing a double set of values and dodging from one to the other according as it suits them. They praise or dispraise a book because its tendency is Communist, Catholic, Fascist or what-not ; but at the same time, they pretend to be judging it on purely aesthetic grounds.

At that time, even more than now, art for art's sake was going strong, though the phrase itself had been discarded as ninety-ish ; "art has nothing to do with morality" was the favourite slogan. The artist was conceived as leaping to and fro in a moral, political and economic void, usually in pursuit of something called "Beauty", which was always one jump ahead.

The truth is that ours is not an age for mysterious romances about lunatics in ruined chateaux, because it is not an age in which one can be unaware of contemporary reality. You can't ignore Hitler, Mussolini, unemployment, aeroplanes and the radio ; you can only pretend to do so, which means lopping off a large chunk of your consciousness.

This is not an inherent fault of the sociological novel—in fact probably a majority of the novels worth reading are novels-with-a-purpose. Compare Zola, for instance. The scenes of violence Zola describes in Germinal and La Debacle are supposed to symbolise capitalist corruption, but they are also scenes. At his best, Zola is not synthetic. He works under a sense of compulsion, and not like an amateur cook...

By far the best thing in the book is a memory from the author's youth, an incident-imaginary, but typical of real facts—in the Dutch colonial war of 1900-12. It describes the torture of a villager who knew, or was supposed to know, where a rebel chieftain was hiding. Apart from the depth of imagination with which the scene is pictured, it brings home as a thousand political pamphlets could not do...

Live among palm trees and mosquitoes in savage sunshine, in the smell of garlic and the creaking of bullock-cart wheels, and you pine for Europe until the time comes when you would exchange the whole of the so-called beauties of the East for the sight of a single snowdrop, or a frozen pond, or a red pillar-box. Come back to Europe, and all you can remember is the blood-red flowers of the hibiscus and the flying foxes

English fiction on its higher levels is for the most part written by literary gents about literary gents for literary gents; on its lower levels it is generally the most putrid "escape" stuff—old maids' fantasies about Ian Hay male virgins, or little fat men's visions of themselves as Chicago gangsters.

Out of all Conrad's books, why choose Almayer's Folly? There is nothing memorable in it except a certain underlying feeling which one might not detect unless one had lived in the East. At present Conrad is out of fashion, ostensibly because of his florid style and redundant adjectives (for my part I like a florid style:...but actually, I suspect, because he was a gentleman, a type hated by the modern intelligentsia.

Obviously, modern mechanised life becomes dreary if you let it. The awful thraldom of money is upon everyone and there are only three immediately obvious escapes. One is religion, another is unending work, the third is the kind of drab antinomianism—lying in bed till four in the afternoon, drinking Pernod—that Mr Connolly seems to admire.

M is a very good speaker. His speech was the usual claptrap—Empire free trade, down with the Jew and the foreigner, higher wages and shorter hours all round, etc etc. After the preliminary booing the (mainly) working-class audience was easily bamboozled by M speaking from as it were a Socialist angle, condemning the treachery of successive governments towards the workers.

...the other a youngish, very intelligent and extremely well-informed man named Creed. From his refined accent, quiet voice and apparent omniscience, I took him for a librarian. I find he keeps a tobacconist's shop and was previously a commercial traveller. During the war he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector. On this occasion the talk was called "If Plato lived Today",

When Mr H at Wigan went to the mine to draw his compensation, he had to go, for some reason I did not understand, on two separate days each week, and was kept waiting in the cold for about an hour before he was paid. In addition the four tram journeys to and from the mine cost him 1/-, reducing his compensation from 29/- weekly to 28/-. He took this for granted, of course.

Another point is this. Liverpool is practically governed by Roman Catholics. The Roman Catholic ideal, at any rate as put forward by the Chesterton-Beachcomber type of writer, is always in favour of private ownership and against Socialist legislation and "progress" generally. The Chesterton type of writer wants to see a free peasant or other small-owner living in his own privately owned & probably insanitary cottage;

I was impressed by the fact that Liverpool is doing much more in the way of slum-clearance than most towns. The slums are still very bad but there are great quantities of Corporation houses and flats at low rents. Just outside Liverpool there are quite considerable towns consisting entirely of Corporation houses, which are really quite livable and decent to look at,

Moreover, though the re-housing from the public funds is, as I say, in effect a Socialist measure, the actual work is done by private contractors, and one may assume that here as elsewhere the contractors tend to be the friends, brothers, nephews etc of those on the Corporation. Beyond a certain point therefore Socialism & Capitalism are not easy to distinguish, the State & the capitalist tending to merge into one.

Both the Ms were faintly scandalised to hear I had been in the common lodging house in Manchester. I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no, i.e. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes bourgeois.

A marvellous morning. Earth frozen hard as iron, not a breath of wind and the sun shining brightly. Not a soul stirring. Rudyard Lake had frozen over during the night. Wild ducks walking about disconsolately on the ice. The sun coming up and the light slanting along the ice the most wonderful red-gold colour I have ever seen. Spent a long time throwing stones over the ice.

He told me how in France in 1918, on the heels of the retreating Germans, he looted some priceless glass which was discovered and looted from him in turn by his divisional general. Also showed me some nice pieces of pewter and some very curious Japanese pictures, showing clear traces of European influence, looted by his father in some naval expedition about 1860.

Still, it was a great day for Mr Wodehouse when he created Jeeves, and thus escaped from the realm of comedy, which in England always stinks of virtue, into the realm of pure farce. The great charm of Jeeves is that (although he did pronounce Nietzsche to be "fundamentally unsound") he is beyond good and evil.