(1940)

 

inside the whale

 

 

(wiki)

 

Part 1

Orwell notes that a novel written about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter of Paris seems an unlikely candidate to be a novel of outstanding value at the time, as its mental atmosphere belongs to the 1920s rather than the 1930s. Orwell is not concerned with the proliferation of 'unprintable words', but is more interested in the way Miller writes about the man in the street. He sees its value not by revealing what is strange, but what is familiar, and in this respect it has much in common with James Joyce in Ulysses. He describes the prose as astonishing.

Orwell rejects another popular comparison with Céline's Journey to the End of the Night which is a book-with-a-purpose, but introduces a comparison with Walt Whitman whose literature is one of "acceptance" of life as it is rather than a struggle to change it. It is because he is passive to experience that Miller is able to get nearer to the 'ordinary man'. This is out of key with the times when writers had an active involvement in politics and is reflected in the difference between the literature of the Spanish Civil War written by "cocksure partisans telling you what to think" and that of the Great War literature written by "victims".

Part 2

Orwell sets Tropic of Cancer against its literary context with a perusal of literary trends since the First World War. First there is A. E. Housman with nostalgic descriptions of the countryside and adolescent despair, which Orwell revered as a teenager in Shropshire Lad. After Housman and the nature poets there was a new movement of the 1920s of unrelated writers with a similar outlook such as Joyce, Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Lytton Strachey. These were noted by their pessimistic outlook and lack of interest in politics in the narrower sense. In the 1930s writing took on a serious purpose with the W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender group including people like Cecil Day Lewis and Christopher Isherwood. Orwell saw a Boy scout leader type of prosetylising from this group which consisted people from an almost identical public-school-university-Bloomsbury background.

Orwell notes the left-leaning tendency of this group and its fascination with communism. Describing the communist as a Russian publicity agent, Orwell seeks an explanation for this. In addition to the common ground of anti-fascism he sees that after the debunking of Western civilisation and the disappearance of traditional middle class values and aspirations, people need something to believe in and Communism has replaced Catholicism as the escapist ideal. Orwell identifies another factor which is the softness and security of life in England against which the secret police and summary executions are too remote. He cites Cyril Connolly in Enemies of Promise for whom the key eventful period in his life was his public school education – "five years in a lukewarm bath of snobbery". As an adjunct Orwell notes that what really frightened him about the Spanish Civil War was how these people adopted the mental attitudes of great war in support of their cause.

Part 3

For Orwell, Miller is a writer who gets away from being a political animal. His passivity is illustrated by his declaration that Orwell's plan to go to Spain was "the act of an idiot". Miller used the analogy of Jonah and the Whale to apply to Anaïs Nin, and this is taken up by Orwell as describing the final unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility. Referring again to the great war Orwell notes the surviving readable works are those written from a passive negative angle and he highlights Prufrock by T. S. Eliot. Miller's is a human voice among bomb explosions. Orwell predicts the break-up of laissez faire capitalism and of the liberal-Christian culture and suggests that any novel worth reading will have to follow the lines of Miller's work.

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On Auden – reflecting Orwell's experience as a policeman in Burma

But notice the phrase 'necessary murder'. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens that I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men – I don't mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means – the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells. To me murder is something to be avoided.

Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single glance; and after all he is a completely negative, unconstructive amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive accepter of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.

miller & orwell

The meeting between the two writers didn’t quite come off as one might have expected it to. On the face of it they should have had a lot in common, both having been through the mill, both having been ‘down and out’ in Paris and elsewhere. But what a difference between them in their outlook on life! It was almost the difference between East and West. Miller, in his semi-Oriental detachment, accepted life, all the joys and all the miseries of life, as one accepts rain or sunshine. Orwell’s detachment was less innate than inflicted upon him by the force of circumstances, as it were. Miller was vulnerable and anarchic, expecting nothing from the world at large. Orwell was tough, resilient and politically minded, ever striving in his way to improve the world. Miller was a citizen of the universe and no more proud of it than a green olive is of being green or a black one of being black. Orwell, a typical Englishman, skeptical and disillusioned though he was, still had faith in political dogmas, economic doctrines, in the improvement of the masses through change of government and social reforms.  Liberty and Justice, which for Miller were personal attributes to be acquired only by constant individual self-improvement, were in Orwell’s opinion the appendage of democracy. Both were peace-loving men but, whereas Miller manifested his love of peace by refusing to fight for any cause, Orwell had no reluctance to engage in war, if the cause were, in his opinion, a just one.

‘You admit somewhere in your letter that you have never been fond of war, though at present reconciled to it,’ Miller wrote to me during the last war in a long letter which was later published under the title Murder the Murderer. ‘The truth is that nobody is really fond of war, not even the military-minded. And yet, throughout the short history of the human race, there have been only a few breathing spells of peace. What are we to conclude from this seeming paradox? My own conclusion is the simple, obvious one that, though fearing war, men have never truly and ardently desired peace. I do earnestly desire peace, and what intelligence I have tells me that peace is not attained by fighting but by acting peaceably.’

These lines were not written until June 1944, but the words he employed when Orwell came to enlist his sympathy for the Spanish republican cause were more or less the same, namely that liberty – a spiritual value – cannot be gained by war, any more than a mere military victory can enforce the justice of a cause, any cause. Miller did not try, of course, to win Orwell over to his way of thinking or even to dissuade him from going to Spain. Every man must do what he thinks is right, even if what he thinks right is wrong, was his conviction.
During the course of his visit that afternoon, as I learned later, Orwell had confided to Miller that his experience while serving in the police in India [sic] had left an indelible mark upon him. The suffering he had witnessed and which he had unwillingly aided and abetted, so to speak, had been a source of unremitting preoccupation ever since. It was to wipe out an unwarrantable feeling of guilt that he deliberately invited the deprivations and humiliations so graphically and poignantly described in Down and Out in Paris and London.

Miller of course not only understood Orwell’s desire for self-flagellation, being himself a notorious self-flagellant, but he also felt a great sympathy for him in his predicament. But why, having undergone all that he had, why, he wondered, did Orwell choose to punish himself still further? Miller would not have spoken in this vein to an ordinary volunteer whose idealism required the test of action. In Orwell, however, who he felt had already atoned for any guilt, real or imaginary, he sensed an individual who was of more use to humanity alive than dead.

To this Orwell made the classic reply that in such momentous situations, where the rights and the very existence of a whole people are at stake, there could be no thought of avoiding self-sacrifice. He spoke his convictions so earnestly and humbly that Miller desisted from further argument and promptly gave him his blessings.
‘There’s just one thing,’ said Miller, raising his glass in a final gesture of assent. ‘I can’t let you go to war in this beautiful Savile Row suit of yours. Here, let me present you with this corduroy jacket, it’s just what you need. It isn’t bulletproof but at least it’ll keep you warm. Take it, if you like, as my contribution to the Spanish republican cause.’

Orwell vehemently denied that he wore a Savile Row suit (it actually came from the Charing Cross Road) but accepted Miller’s gift in the spirit in which it was offered. Henry discreetly refrained from adding that Orwell would have been welcome to the jacket even had he chosen to fight for the opposite side.