Orwell (17 page)

Isaac Rosenfeld's shrewed observation that Orwell “was a radical in politics and a conservative in feeling,”
⁷
both a socialist and a man in love with the past, explains why Orwell is so deeply ambivalent about the prewar period. He criticizes the English for “obstinately clinging to everything that is out of date and a nuisance,” but creates an ideal pub, “The Moon under Water,” in which “everything has the solid comfortable ugliness of the
nineteenth century.” He praises the postcards of Donald McGill, for “there is no sign in them of any attempt to induce an outlook acceptable to the ruling class,” but he calls “Boys' Weeklies” “sodden in the worst illusions of 1910” because they inculcate pernicious social and political attitudes: the boys “get what they are looking for, but they get it wrapped up in the illusions which their future employers think suitable for them.” In “England Your England,” he states that both the common people and the intellectuals must and do oppose the existing social order, yet he also attacks the prewar world of “Boys' Weeklies” that is very similar in mood to his description of Lower Binfield: “The year is 1910…. There is a cosy fire in the study, and outside the wind is whistling. The ivy clusters thickly round the old grey stones. The King is on his throne and the pound is worth a pound…. Everything is safe, solid and unquestionable. Everything will be the same for ever and ever.”

Since Orwell believes “one of the dominant facts in English life during the past three-quarters of a century has been the decay of ability in the ruling class” and since all the peace and serenity of prewar England depends on the leisure of the few and the labor of the many, he admires the working, lower-middle and middle-class aspects of the prewar world but attacks the upper-middle and upper-class characteristics. In “Such, Such Were the Joys,” Orwell both criticizes and cherishes the decent but rather decadent “age of
The Merry Widow
, Saki's novels and
Peter Pan”
and describes the “atmosphere, as it were, of eating everlasting strawberry ices on green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song. The extraordinary thing was the way in which everyone took it for granted that this oozing, bulging wealth of the English upper and upper-middle classes would last forever, and was part of the order of things. After 1918 it was never quite the same again.” In
Coming Up
, Pixy Glen, like Wendy's Tea Shoppe, represents a spurious attempt by the lower-middle classes to climb upwards by returning to the artificiality of Barrie's prewar world.

“I am not able, and I do not
want
, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood,” writes Orwell; and when in the summer of 1940 he escaped into the country with his dog, Marx, and had two glorious days at Wallington, in Hertfordshire, “the whole thing took me straight back to my childhood, perhaps the last bit of that kind of life that I shall ever have.” Though Orwell yearns to return to his boyhood years, it is rather difficult to reconcile his childhood nostalgia with the grim tortures of “Such, Such Were the Joys.” It would seem that this ideal childhood existed only in Orwell's imagination and that his works represent a fairly consistent attempt to recreate and perpetuate this myth.

Orwell has a keen desire to establish a continuity between the England of the past and the present and is particularly attracted to writers who, like T. S. Eliot, carry on the human heritage by “keeping in touch with prewar emotions.” The most perfect embodiment of the prewar myth of eternal ease and blue summer skies is Brooke's “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester” (1912). In “The Captain's Doll,” Lawrence also writes with retrospective nostalgia about these peaceful years which “seemed lovely, almost like before the war: almost the same feeling of eternal holiday, as if the world was made for man's everlasting holiday.”
⁸
Reviewing Edmund Blunden's
Cricket Country
, Orwell states “the essential thing in this book, as in nearly everything that Mr. Blunden writes, is his nostalgia for the golden age before 1914, when the world was peaceful as it has never since been”; and he says almost the same thing about H. G. Wells, whose greatest gift “was his power to convey the atmosphere of the golden years between 1890 and 1914.”
⁹
Wells'
The History of Mr. Polly
(1910) has a strong effect on Bowling and, as Orwell says of
Coming Up
in a letter to Julian Symons, “Of course the book was bound to suggest Wells watered down. I have a great admiration for Wells as a writer, and he was a very early influence on me.”

This golden tranquility was shattered forever by the kind of modern war that Bowling experienced in Flanders and Orwell fought in Spain. The unrefrigerated backyard of the Binfield butcher “smelt like a battlefield”; the ravaged landscape of “tincans, turds, mud, weeds, clumps of rusty barbed wire” (81) is exactly like the catalogue of the Aragon front; both Orwell and Bowling try to escape war by fishing; and the description of Bowling's explosive wound derives from that day at Huesca when Orwell was shot through the throat. Bowling believes that if war did not kill you it was bound to make you think about the kind of world that would emerge from the ruins, and some aspects of the world of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
already exist in
Coming Up:
the blunt razor-blades, the nasty gusts of wind, the vision of the seedy smashed streets. Bowling finds a severed leg at a bomb site just as Winston Smith finds a severed hand; and, like Winston, the cringing victims in the housing estate lick the hand that wallops them. The red-armed and fertile-bellied prole washerwoman is foreshadowed by Bowling's peaceful glimpse of the roofs where the women hang out the washing, and the “Two Minutes of Hate” is anticipated by the enraged
anti
-Fascist (a nice touch) lecturer at the Left Book Club. Bowling fears the postwar totalitarian State even more than the cataclysmic war, and the Oceania of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
is foreshadowed in
Coming Up:
“
It's all going to happen.
All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries.

The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows” (223–224).

Orwell's apocalyptic belief is similar to Henry Miller's, who told Orwell that “Our civilization was destined to be swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human…. Everywhere there is the sense of the approaching cataclysm.” Miller made a powerful impression on Orwell, and his astonishing indifference and passivity about the impending doom was both fascinating and deeply attractive. Miller, perhaps more than any other modern writer, totally rejects Orwell's concept of decency, his vague but important term for the synthesis of the traditional English virtues that he describes in “England Your England”: gentleness, fairness, integrity, unselfishness, comradeship, patriotism, respect for legality, belief in justice, liberty and truth. In the world of modern power politics, especially as Orwell describes it, these qualities barely survive: they exist in Wiltshire perhaps, but not in Whitehall. One of his major weaknesses is that he puts too much faith in this ineffectual and disappearing decency, for decent men seldom achieve political power, and if they do, they rarely remain decent. Yet Orwell feels the need to believe in
something
—“The real problem is how to restore the religious attitude while accepting death as final”—and there is nothing else left to believe in
but
decency.

Miller's extreme immorality and sensuality and his imaginative intensity are precisely the qualities that Orwell lacks, and his social radicalism is characteristically American just as Orwell's conservatism is typically English. Orwell's profound and ambiguous attraction (revealed in his long essay and three enthusiastic book reviews on Miller) to someone who could remain so oblivious and insulated, illuminates Orwell's strange ambivalence about preserving the past and about his intense commitment to the concept of decency.

Like Miller, James Joyce also rejects decency and remains supremely indifferent to modern politics. As Orwell says, Joyce wrote
“Ulysses
in Switzerland, with an Austrian passport and a British pension, during the 1914–18 war, to which he paid as nearly as possible no attention.” Orwell is extremely enthusiastic about
Ulysses
, studies it carefully and writes about it frequently. In a letter of 1933 he says, “Joyce interests me so much that I can't stop talking about him once I start”; and the following year he makes a witty comparison between himself and the author of
Ulysses
in a Joycean sexual-musical image: “When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production and can pass himself off fairly well as a bass or baritone, but if you listen closely you can hear the good old squeak just the same
as ever.” Orwell's novel has several Joycean echoes. The firm of Wilson & Bloom builds houses on Bowling's street; Orwell's epigraph, “He's dead, but he won't lie down,” recalls the song “Finnegan's Wake”; and Bowling reads Molly's favorite author, Paul de Kock.

Orwell's many statements about
Ulysses
illuminate the central theme of his own novel—the lost world of childhood and the fearful despair of ordinary people in the modern world—as well as the personality and character of Bowling, who is modeled on Leopold Bloom:

Here is a whole world of stuff which you have lived with since childhood, stuff which you supposed to be of its nature incommunicable and somebody has managed to communicate it. The effect is to break down, at any rate momentarily, the solitude in which the human being lives. When you read certain passages in
Ulysses
you feel that Joyce's mind and your mind are one, that he knows all about you though he has never heard your name, that there exists some world outside time and space in which you and he are together. And though he does not resemble Joyce in other ways, there is a touch of this quality in Henry Miller.

[Ulysses] sums up better than any book I know the fearful despair that is almost normal in modern times.

Books about ordinary people behaving in an ordinary manner are extremely rare, because they can only be written by someone who is capable of standing both inside and outside the ordinary man, as Joyce for instance stands inside and outside Bloom.

[Bloom has] a streak of intellectual curiosity…. [He] is a rather exceptionally sensitive specimen of the man in the street, and I think the especial interest of this is that the cultivated man and the man in the street so rarely meet in modern literature.

While writing
Coming Up
, Orwell describes Bowling as being, like Bloom, “rather thoughtful and fairly well-educated, even slightly bookish.” Though Bloom and Bowling (their names are similar though Bowling suggests the bourgeois bowler hat) are not comparable in depth of characterization (the bass and the eunuch), and Bowling is more brash and hardened, they both are intelligent, curious, perceptive, sympathetic, good natured, humorous and vulgar, and both are nostalgic about a happier past. Both characters are “ordinary middling chaps,” and both are salesmen, though Bowling is more successful and feels superior to the two newspaper canvassers (Bloom's
job) whom he meets on the train to London. Both know many obscure “scientific” facts; Bowling's mind, like Bloom's, “goes in jerks”; and the thought of the Albanian King Zog “starts memories” of King Og of Bashan and transports Bowling back to his “incommunicable” childhood through a Joycean “stream of consciousness” that attempts to capture the past: “The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago…. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually
in
the past” (30).

In 1948 Orwell responded to Julian Symons' criticism of
Coming Up
and said: “Of course you are perfectly right about my own character constantly intruding on that of the narrator. I am not a real novelist anyway, and that particular vice is inherent in writing a novel in the first person, which one should never do.” This frank admission of his lack of imaginative power (and his need to write for money) explains why Orwell's books have so much in common and why his novels are so often nourished by his essays. It also explains his eager receptivity to the influence of Joyce and of D. H. Lawrence, to whom he also alludes in this novel.

A man named Mellors gives Bowling the racing tip that provides his escape money; and like Lawrence's Mellors, Bowling rises to the officer class during the war and becomes, temporarily, a gentleman. Lawrence's story “The Thorn in the Flesh” is referred to in the novel, and Bowling enjoys reading
Sons and Lovers.
More significantly, the mood of
Coming Up
, and, indeed, of many of Orwell's works of the Thirties, is close to the opening sentences of
Lady Chatterley's Lover
—“Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins”—and to the dark prophecies of Lawrence's letters: “I am so sad, for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 2000 years, which is now collapsing, that it is hard to live. So much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming … the winter stretches ahead, where all vision is lost and all memory dies out.”
¹⁰

A disintegrating civilization on the verge of an annihilating war has been the subject of the greatest novels of our time—
Women in Love, Remembrance of Things Past, The Magic Mountain
—and
Coming Up
belongs thematically with these books. Written a generation later, the novel conveys many of the modes of thought and feeling characteristic of Orwell's age—the uncertainty, fear and despair that is expressed in Spengler's
Decline of the West
and Yeats' “The Second Coming,” in Miller's
Tropic of Cancer
and Auden's “September 1, 1939.” As Leonard Woolf writes in his autobiography:
“In 1914 in the background of one's life and one's mind there were light and hope; by 1918 one had unconsciously accepted a perpetual public menace and darkness and had admitted in the privacy of one's mind or soul an iron fatalistic acquiescence in insecurity and barbarism.”
¹¹