politics - TL:DR (That's Long, DID Read)

11 June 1936: The International Surrealist Exhibition

Sheila Legge, ‘the Surrealist Phantom’, photograph by Claude Cahun

Thursday, June 11^th, 1936. Ominous, disturbingly relatable context; one week earlier, Mussolini had authorised his troops to kill the prisoners they had taken in the war that followed Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Shortly thereafter, Haile Selassie, Emperor in exile, would appeal to the League of Nations against the Fascists, but of the 57 member states, only a handful imposed sanctions against Italy. One of those was the Republic of Spain, which within a month would itself be shattered by civil war. Earlier that spring, Hitler had goose-stepped his troops into the Rhineland in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles. Even in London itself, the alarm caused by the organised marches of Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists, would, by the end of the year, result in the Public Order Act, banning the wearing of political uniforms in any public place.

On that Thursday though*, in Trafalgar Square on a hot, clammy morning, (June 1936 was notable for unsettled and unseasonal weather) a young woman with a head apparently made of flowers stood among the pigeons. A dreamlike, haunting, alarming and perhaps ridiculous figure for dreamlike, haunting, alarming but definitely ridiculous** times. Underneath the flowers and wedding dress was a human being, the artist and poet Sheila Legge, but on that day, in combination with that costume and a few accessories (a raw pork chop and/or just a prosthetic leg, depending which account you believe) she became ‘the surrealist phantom’*** and drew crowds to the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries.

* sadly, it was also the day that Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian committed suicide

**For the next few years, while the tension in UK and Europe inexorably rose, there was also a more than normal amount of reported paranormal activity, with both the International Institute for Psychical Research and its rival the Society for Psychical Research logging record numbers of hauntings and reports of poltergeist activity. Also, it’s worth remembering that in the 30s, Hitler had a ‘Charlie Chaplin moustache’, rather than the other way around

*** or rather, a surrealist phantom; also present, though not exhibiting in the show, was Claude Cahun, one of the most enigmatic figures of 20th century art, apparently taking photographs, one of which is presumably the image of Sheila Legge used above

The incongruity of the flower-headed apparition was an embodiment of the intention of the surrealist movement as initially laid out in 1924 by its founder, André Breton, who was master of ceremonies at the opening of the London exhibition:

“I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.”

Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), translated by Richard Seaver & Helen R Lane in Manifestoes of Surrealism (Ann Arbor paperbacks, 972, p.14)

Yves Tanguy – I Am Waiting For You (1934)

For all of its apparent frivolity too, the flower-headed phantom was calculated to provoke a reaction beyond being simply an advertisement for an exhibition. Its irrational beauty, Arcimboldo-meets-Dalí, was manifestation as manifesto, remembering Breton’s railing against

“the hate of the marvellous which rages in certain men, this absurdity beneath which they try to bury it. Let us not mince words: the marvellous is always beautiful, anything marvellous is beautiful, in fact only the marvellous is beautiful”(ibid.)

The exhibition offered the public many different kinds of marvellous; there were over 400 exhibits – paintings, sculptures and‘surrealist objects’ as well as an array of ‘ethnographic’ items from diverse cultures around the world and ‘natural objects interpreted’. Around 60 artists were represented, including most of the ‘big names’ of European surrealism, alongside a range of less well-known, home grown British artists. It showed, too, that surrealism was always a broader church than its critics tended to give it credit for. In the exhibition, surrealism was less a style or set of styles (many of the artists represented were not necessarily surrealists per se) and more a way of seeing, or a way of being. This was embodied in artworks as diverse as Giorgio de Chirico’s ominous dreamscapes, Hans/Jean Arp’s evocative wood reliefs, Constantin Brâncuși’s Vorticist-influenced sculptures and a generous selection of Picassos, from cubist masterpieces to his latest works, alongside surrealist paintings that were already taking on an iconic aspect, by the group’s most prominent members and associates, including Dali, Max Ernst, Magritte, Miro and Klee.

Radically, the exhibition also included works by eleven female artists* – not a huge amount percentage-wise, but an extremely significant proportion by the standards of the time; and among that ten were some of the most important artists (of any gender) of the era.

* Eileen Agar, Jacqueline B., Leonor Fini, Dora Maar, Maruja Mallo, Meret Oppenheim, Grace Pailthorpe (hailed by Breton as ‘the best and most truly surrealist’ of British artists), Toyen, Sophie Taueber-Arp, Margaret Nash, Gala Dali, Sheila Legge

The exhibition was hugely successful, with over 25, 000 visitors attending during its month-long run, and it fulfilled what surrealism could be, both to its adherents and to its critics. It was profound, it was disturbing; it was also at times very silly. Notoriously, Dalí gave an inaudible speech while wearing a deep sea diving suit from which he had to be rescued, while Breton and Paul Éluard delivered more comprehensible lectures, volume-wise at least. In the original manifesto, Breton had written, “We really live by our fantasies when we give free rein to them” but that was in 1924; if surrealism had started out in part as an offshoot of Dada, a reaction to the horrors of World War One and a rejection of the rationalist values of the 19^th century that had led to it, the atmosphere of the 30s was (and was felt at the time to be) distinctively pre-war.

Pablo Picasso – Seated Woman in a Red Hat (1934)

Constantin Brâncuși – The Chimera (1918)

The official Surrealist Group of 1936 (that is, the main group among the many surrealist streams of 1936, as Breton’s regular fallings out with those close to him led to a series of splinter groups) was, explicitly, a political organisation. Some key original members, such as the ‘prophet of surrealism’ himself, Robert Desnos (of whom Breton said “Desnos speaks Surrealist at will”) were opposed to the aligning of the group with a left-wing political cause. Desnos’ fate – arrested by the Gestapo, sent to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald before finally dying in Terezin concentration camp of typhoid in 1945, however, showed that for those without the financial means of Breton and Dalí, politics could not be easily avoided. But more than that, the nature of surrealism itself was entirely incompatible with the totalitarianism that was marching across Europe:

“Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery…is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be…” Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) p.4-5.

Reuben Mednikoff – The Stairway To Paradise (1936)

Dalí – perhaps not surprisingly, given his aristocratic background – was less comfortable than Breton was with the politics of the far left, but although often portrayed as a simple narcissist (wrong; he was not simple), he was very aware of the psychology underlying the ideological dogma that was overtaking Europe, arguing in 1935 that the moral hunger left by the weakening of state religion had led a people “systematically cretinized by machinism” and suffering from “ideological disorder” towards Hitler and his vision of the Third Reich. (actually what he said is far more Dalí-esque and funny; Hitler’s followers…

“seek in vain to bite into the senile and triumphant softness of the plump, atavistic, tender, militaristic, and territorial back of any Hitlerian nursemaid. [This]irrational hunger…is placed before a cultural dining table on which are found only . . . cold and insubstantial leftovers.” The Conquest of the Irrational, 1935)

the opening of the International Surrealist Exhibition; Dali in diving suit

As was clear from the existence of the British Union of Fascists, Britain in 1936 was far from immune from ‘ideological disorder’ – but despite the fact that the BUF was entrenched enough in society to be running an annual summer camp at Bognor Regis(!), the ideology was not all on the right. Breton, although vehemently Marxist, was not entirely comfortable with the polarising climate of the era, as his speech, The Political Position of Today’s Art given to the “Leftist Front” in Prague in 1935 makes clear:

E.L.T. Mesens – Mask to be used for insulting Aesthetes (collage, 1929)

“These banners that have suddenly begun to flap over Europe, setting a common or social front, a single front or a red front over against a national front, the last battle formation of capitalism, are of a sort to imbue me more and more deeply with the idea that we live in an era in which man belongs to himself less than ever… [The Surrealists] find themselves in the face of a dilemma: either they must give up interpreting and expressing the world in the ways in which each of them finds the secret of within himself and himself alone – it is his very chance of enduring that is at stake – or they must give up collaborating on the practical plan of action for changing the world” April 1, 1935 Manifestoes of Surrealism, p.213

The same year however, perhaps more comfortable on his home turf in Paris, when speaking to the Congress of Writers, Breton made it clear that he intended to have his cake and eat it;

“Transform the world,” Marx said; “change life,” Rimbaud said. These two watchwords are one for us.”

René Magritte – The Difficult Crossing (1926), shown in London

Considered leftist radicals by the right and as decadently bourgeois by the left, surrealism was caught between two ideologies that both managed to miss the entire point of the movement. This was not a ‘centrist’ organisation; it was radical, egalitarian and concerned above all with freedom, especially freedom of thought. Breton had written, “Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable.” (Manifesto of Surrealism p.9), but it was this ambiguity that troubled most of the opponents of Surrealism. The iconic Belgian surrealist René Magritte, who was represented by no less than 14 works in the exhibition, shared Breton’s sentiments;

“People who grasp for symbolic meanings fail to grasp the inherent poetry and mystery of the image. No doubt they sense this mystery, but they wish to get rid of it. They are afraid. By asking ‘what does this mean?’ they express a wish that everything be understandable. But if one does not reject the mystery, one has quite a different response. One asks other things.” (Magritte, Suzi Gablik, Thames & Hudson 1970, p.11)

Leonor Fini with her painting ‘Game of Legs’ which was exhibited at the London show

In fact, for all his aristocratic bearing (a quirk of personality rather than a representation of his actual background), Breton, with his touchstones of Marx, Freud and Rimbaud, was less elitist than the pro-Stalin communist intelligentsia of the British art world could be. The main criticism of upper class critics like Anthony Blunt (who, significantly, was covertly working as a spy for Stalin’s USSR at the time) was that Surrealism had no clear message and would therefore be difficult for the proletariat to understand, championing instead ‘Socialist Realism’ as the preferred avant-garde art movement of the Communist Party.

This basic, patronising idea – ‘ordinary people won’t understand it’ – leaving aside the fact that it ignores Breton & Magritte’s deliberate ambivalence towards ‘understanding’ – was still at the heart of critical attitudes to surrealism as recently as Charles Harrison’s excellent English art and Modernism 1900-1939 (Yale University Press 1981). The division between the Surrealists (I really should decide when that word should and shouldn’t be capitalised) and the communist Artists’ International Association (AIA) is characterised by Harrison (p. 314-5) by the idea that the surrealists were reluctant to let go of the uniqueness of the artist and the artist’s vision. This idea presupposes that the ‘proletariat’ is a kind of homogeneous mob which doesn’t share the individual uniqueness of artists, which is obviously wrong. Breton, who was ultimately concerned with that uniqueness, never seems to have subscribed to the idea of the working class as an unthinking and simple-minded mass. Indeed, his lifelong aim was to make an artist or poet of everyone.

But the idea of surrealism as part controversialist nonsense, part artistic elitism persisted. Even Herbert Read – one of the pre-eminent art critics of the period, modernist and a Marxist – despite being involved in the staging of the exhibition itself – tended to evaluate surrealism negatively in the revolutionary scheme of things, compared to pure abstraction, saying :

[Surrealism is]“a negative art… a destructive art; it follows that it has only a temporary role” whereas abstract art “has a positive function. It keeps inviolate, until such time as society will once more be ready to make use of them, the universal qualities of art” Five On Revolutionary Art (1935, Artists’ International Association)

But in fact, Dalí in his 1929 Declaration had already pre-empted this criticism; “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision” and arguably the idea of a rarefied ‘pure art’ which is somehow divisible from human nature and human experience is one of those shackles.

Paul Nash – Harbour and Room (1932-6), one of several outstanding works by British artists at the show

Despite the negativity of parts of the leftist establishment, Breton was keen to stress in his Prague address that fascism was the enemy of all progressive art;

“Hitler and his acolytes are, unfortunately, very well aware that it was necessary not only to persecute Marxists, but to forbid all avant-garde art in order to stifle leftist thought even for a short time” Manifestoes of Surrealism, p.233

Wilhelm Freddie with one of the artworks seized by customs on their way to the exhibition

Ironically, despite the controversy surrounding surrealism there was very little opposition to the London exhibition from the ‘establishment’ as such, aside from the seizure of some works by the Danish artist Wilhelm Freddie on pornography charges. And although the AIA were not especially supportive of surrealism in general (as Harrison points out, “many of the aspirations of the AIA members were kept alive by a roseate vision of the conditions of art – and life – in Stalinist Russia” English Art and Modernism, p.313), the differences between factions could be put aside when occasion demanded it. In November 1936, the Surrealists and the AIA together challenged the government’s position on the Spanish civil war in their Declaration on Spain by explicitly siding against the fascists. The two groups joined forces again in 1938 to exhibit Picasso’s Guernica in protest at events in Spain, significantly showing the painting not just in the New Burlington Galleries, but also in the Whitechapel Gallery in the heart of the working class East End. (Matthew Gale, Dada and Surrealism, Phaidon 1997, p.346-9)

Although largely male-dominated, the fact that the Surrealist group’s aims were to create a revolution in the mind/spirit before, or simultaneous with, a social revolution meant that whereas for groups like the Communist Party, equality of the sexes was something to think about after the revolution had been won (an attitude christened ‘brocialism’ by Sarah Ditum in an excellent recent article for The New European – issue #97, May 31 2018, p.19-21) ideas of gender and sex at both a conscious and subconscious level were central to the group’s work. This inevitably resulted in much objectification and a preoccupation with woman-as-muse, but Breton’s championing of female artists was rarely paternalistic, even if it was as otherworldly as all of his writing;

“The cry for freedom received an absolutely noble and authentic answer in the work of Toyen, work as luminous as her own heart yet streaked through by dark forebodings.” Surrealism and Painting, translated by Simon Watson Taylor, MacDonald & Co, 1972, p.210

The Czech artist Toyen (born Marie Čermínová) was represented in the London exhibition by two oil paintings and was definitive of the kind of artist drawn to the surrealist cause. Politically an anti-Stalinist communist, her work defies easy analysis, as did Toyen herself. Sometimes characterised by those who knew her as transgender, sometimes as an androgynous lesbian, sometimes as an almost femme-fatale-like heterosexual temptress (she could, pretentiously no doubt, be labelled sur-gender) her name, seemingly chosen for its non-gender specific quality – and the few photographs of her that exist, tend to encourage the mythologising of her rather than clarifying her true nature. And that is surely the point; had she wanted to be easily pigeonholed, she could have left something unambiguous behind.

Cecil Collins – Angel Images and Negative Spectres in Conflict (1933)

Browsing the catalogue of the Surrealist Exhibition of 1936, with its mixture of high art (oil paintings, sculpture), photographs, found objects and disconcerting titles is to look into the troubled heart and dreams of a profoundly troubled time. The general perception of surrealism may be of something self consciously ‘weird’ but even that shows that if surrealism is anything, it is profoundly human. The fact that the work of an artist as idiosyncratic as Toyen could be seen by 25,000 people in London at a time when totalitarianism closed down independent thought across Europe and beyond, demonstrates that, despite the disapproval of the champions of socialist realism, surrealism was as revolutionary – and as successful – an art movement as there has ever been. After all, if a revolution doesn’t allow people to express their essential person-hood then why bother to fight fascism at all?

These are things I read before writing this:

Karla Tonine Huebner – Eroticism, Identity and Cultural Context: Toyen and the Prague Avant-Garde (2008). I can’t recommend this highly enough, incredibly enlightening and fascinating and you can read it all here

Andre Breton – Manifestoes of Surrealism (translated by Richard Seaver & Helen R Lane, Ann Arbor paperbacks, 1972) Essential surrealist reading and fun, a lot of the time. I can never decide how much I like Breton, but when he’s good, he’s good

Matthew Gale – Dada and Surrealism (Phaidon, 1997) I think the best short overview of the two schools and their connections that I’ve read; he covers a lot of ground

Sarane Alexandrian – Surrealist Art (Thames & Hudson, 1970) A very personal look at the main surrealist movement by someone who was there for a lot of it. Alexandrian thinks quite deeply, but at the same time is absolutely Breton’s man, so some of the most interesting surrealists outside of the orbit of Paris don’t get much space

Jennifer Mundy (ed.) – Surrealism – Desire Unbound (Tate Publishing, 2001) One of the absolute best books on surrealism I’ve read; fantastic essays, brilliantly illustrated.

Arthur Cravan, Jacques Rigaut, Julien Torma, Hacques Vaché – 4 Dada Suicides (trans. Terry Hale, Paul Lenti, Iain White, Atlas Anti-Classics, 2005) Has very little to do with the actual article above but it’s such an amazing book & does give some authentic background to the earliest days of surrealism

all of the pictures in this article (apart from the photo of Sheila Legge) were shown in the exhibition – as far as I can tell; the names of works in the catalogue aren’t always very reliable

the vanishing everything of everywhere – elegies and illusions

“Time, time, time, see what’s become of me…” When The Bangles covered Simon & Garfunkel’s A Hazy Shade of Winter in 1987, the song was 21 years and one month old, and now (January 2018) The Bangles’ version (from the underrated – according to me – movie of Bret Easton Ellis’ Less Than Zero) is 30 years and one month old; time flies, another year draws to an end etc etc etc. It took until the early 1990s for 60s nostalgia to really take hold and, true to form 30 years on from the 1980s, 80s nostalgia is everywhere; in music, in fashion and (especially) in film and television. Even the tired, terrifying old tropes of the cold war are back; excellent stuff.

It’s approximately 90 years since HP Lovecraft wrote, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” (in the essay Supernatural Horror in Literature (1926-7)), and it’s got to be something like 25 years or so since I first read those words (in the HP Lovecraft Omnibus Vol 2, Dagon and other Macabre Tales, Grafton Books, 1985, p.423 ). So what about it?

Lovecraft might well be right about fear; but more pertinent to my intro is that possibly the oldest emotion preserved in literature – at least (major, major caveat, based on my ignorance) in the literature of Europe – is nostalgia, and the feeling that things were better in the past. (see also here for an excellent & thoughtful look at nostalgia) The literature of the ancient Greeks makes clear that the age of heroes already lay in the distant past. The pride and arrogance of Imperial Rome was tempered – formally, at least – by the belief that it was a pale imitation of the Republic which the Empire supplanted. The earliest literature in (old) English makes it clear that the inhabitants of what was one day to become England were a) not entirely sure of what had come before, but b) knew that it was in many ways ‘better’ and certainly more impressive than the present day of the 8th century:

“The work of the Giants, the stonesmiths,/ mouldereth…
And the wielders and wrights?/Earthgrip holds them – gone, long gone”

The Ruin, (Translated by Michael Alexander, The Earliest English Poems, Penguin Classics (3rd edition, 1991, p. 2)

Even closer to home (for me), the earliest literature of Scotland, the Goddodin of the poet Aneirin, does something similar. The poem dates from somewhere from the 7th to 10th century and is written in the ancient British language now called Old Welsh (which it is of course, but it is also, geographically, old English and old Scots, since it seems to have been spoken in a far wider area than modern Wales). The Goddodin is a series of elegies mourning the loss of the warriors of the eponymous ancient kingdom (which spread roughly over what are now the modern Scottish regions of Lothian and Borders) in battle, and with them the heroic culture of their era.*

*a perennial theme that crops up in a very similar form in the Fortinbras subplot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, preserved at one remove from the earliest known version of the story, Saxo Grammaticus’ elemental/mythological 13th century version from his Gesta Danorum. But even this is assumed to be derived from an earlier, lost source, probably Icelandic.

To say that nostalgia as opposed to fear may be mankind’s oldest emotion is problematic. Logically it’s difficult (chicken/egg innit), but also, for all of its obvious dominant ingredients – sadness/regret and happiness – a large component of nostalgia can be fear, and, specifically, Lovecraft’s ‘fear of the unknown’ (in this case the always unknowable future). That’s problematic for many reasons. In the examples of nostalgia noted above, the glamour (not intended to have its old, magical meaning, but actually that’s probably even more appropriate) attached to the past is partly because it can’t come again. If the people of “now” were as noble, heroic etc as the people of “then”, then somehow the past and the ancestors – a vital component of the values of most non-Christian and pre-Christian cultures – are devalued and not receiving their due reverence.

Although it seems almost incomprehensible to someone of my generation, there seems to be a similar, ‘don’t disrespect the ancestors’ unease nowadays in some circles that’s manifested in an unwillingness to condemn wholesale the expansion/existence of the British Empire. And really, it’s not very complicated – it is entirely possible to be impressed by and/or grateful for the innovations of the Victorian era – flushing toilets, railways and whatnot – while also seeing the culture and times for what they were; repressive, oppressive, misogynistic, racist, ignorant. It shouldn’t be difficult, because it’s happened before. Christianity made it easy for previous ages to condemn the pagan empires of Rome, Greece, Egypt and co (and indeed the ancient Arabic civilisations) without abandoning the inventions and innovations of those same ‘decadent’ civilisations. Indeed, even at the height of Christian belief in Europe, interest in the cultures of the pagan empires remained high, even if Christian scholars felt the need to inflict a version of their own value system onto their researches. There’s no reason that people now shouldn’t be able to do the same with the ages we have left behind, or are hopefully in the process of leaving behind. Yes, good things come from bad cultures or societies, but not because of the bad, but just because (most) human beings are extraordinary.

In 2017 there seemed to be – as I suppose there always must be – an ever-increasing number of warring nostalgias and counter-nostalgias, the latest being for the Russian Revolution in 1917 – a violent event, with vast and oppressive consequences and therefore definitely negative, but like most revolutions, born of aspirations and ideals which are hard to dismiss. In fact, Dickens’ famous opening to A Tale Of Two Cities seems uncannily prophetic, because Dickens – as he explicitly realised – could see that human nature and human actions remain fairly constant:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only”

I think it’s probably true that it’s always the best of times, for somebody, in some respect. It’s certainly always the worst of times for other people; which sounds complacent or at least fatalistic, but only if one doesn’t try in some way to improve things. This kind of impersonal nostalgia – for ‘better’ times – is, necessarily selective. (in fact, all nostalgia is, because perception is selective – hmm, it seems like this just started copying the thing about realism I wrote recently, but bear with me) and relies to a large degree on ignorance and/or self-deception in order to be nostalgia at all.

History isn’t really a subject, history is everything; people, peoples, cultures, societies, but, necessarily “history” as it’s taught, or absorbed through popular culture, filters and simplifies. That’s important, because when people in Britain talk nostalgically about ‘Victorian values’ you can (usually) assume that they don’t intend any reference to the exploitation and subjugation of untold millions of people, child prostitution and child labour, the life expectancy of the average Victorian person etc. And, as always, history is more complex than its popular image. The Victorian era may be symbolised for British people by the building of railways or the expansion of the Empire, or by Jack the Ripper, or Queen Victoria being unamused, or by the establishment’s treatment of Oscar Wilde; but it was also the era that produced and shaped Jack the Ripper, Queen Victoria and of course, Wilde himself, as well as the whole decadent movement. Interestingly, Sigmund Freud was only two years younger than Wilde; an apparently value-free but perhaps significant observation.

This kind of complexity is what makes history more interesting than it’s sometimes given credit for. The Scottish Enlightenment was a wonderful, positive, outward-looking movement, but it coexisted in Scotland with a joyless, moralising and oppressive Calvinist culture. Time and nostalgia have a way of homogenising peoples and cultures. The popular idea of ancient Rome is probably one of conquest, grandeur and decadence, but what is the popular idea, if there is one, of ‘an ancient Roman’? Someone, probably a man, probably from Italy, in a toga or armour; quite likely an emperor, a soldier or a gladiator, rather than say, a merchant, clerk or farmer. But even within this fairly narrow image, a complex figure like the emperor Elagabalus (who was Syrian, teenage, possibly transgender) defeats the obvious school textbook perceptions of ‘Roman-ness’ (as, perhaps, it did for the Romans themselves). Even in our own time, the fact that older generations from the 60s/70s to the present could lament the passing of times when ‘men were men & women were women’ etc is – to say the least – extremely disingenuous. Presumably what they mean is a time when non-‘manly’ men could be openly discriminated against and/or abused and women could be expected to be quiet and submissive.

Similarly, throughout my life I have heard people – and not only right-wing people – talk about the economic success that Hitler brought to Germany. But you don’t have to be the chairperson of a financial think-tank to see that a programme of accelerated militarism that requires war in order to function isn’t really a viable economic model for anyone who doesn’t espouse the ideology of Nazism or at least some kind of Imperial expansionism. But people seemingly want to believe that if it wasn’t for all those pesky Nazi faults Hitler could have been a great leader. He couldn’t, though, because he was a real person, his beliefs were inseparable from everything he did and he really did exist and do the things he did and therefore wasn’t a great leader.

As I’ve said too many times already, history is complex, but nostalgia is too. It’s impossible to express in a single word other than itself, though interestingly, its original Greek meaning (‘homecoming pain’) is actually more specific than the word itself has come to be in English. Possibly because of this hard-to-express quality, most European languages tend to use variations of the word ‘nostalgia’ rather than having a word of their own with the same meaning. But despite that complexity, it tends to have a simplifying quality.

The reason for that simplifying is because, for many people, nostalgia equals safety. Political reactionaries always look to the past for examples of stability and they’ll always find them – but that stability is an illusion, caused by the fact that the past itself is stable, but only in the one sense of being unchangeable. And until the invention of the time machine it will remain unchangeable – but even so, through endless re-interpretations, re-evaluations and new points of view, the picture we have of it fluctuates almost daily. I think it’s fair to assume that (as Dickens implied) every ‘golden age’ masks a dark age but the temptation to look at the past fondly is hard to resist. It often seems otherwise, but people are, by and large fairly positive and want to look back with fondness, even if it’s a melancholy fondness. And the result of that is a softening and distancing of the darker aspects of history. A quote from the great Scottish singer/songwriter Alex Harvey strips away the soft-focus effect that the distorting lens of nostalgia puts on the past:

“Nobody ever won a war. A hundred thousand dead at Waterloo. No glory in that. Nobody needs that.” (quoted in Charles Shaar Murray’s Shots From The Hip, Penguin Books, 1991, p.71)

Numbers aside, that seems indisputably true; but evidently it isn’t, because people are entirely capable of being nostalgic about almost any negative event. ‘The Blitz Spirit’ is remembered fondly in Britain, because the few people still alive who remember it survived it, and because it happened decades ago and bombs are no longer raining down on the UK. Cinema and television is full of nostalgia for even the darkest times, largely because people are supposed to be entertained by these things and structures, stories and likeable characters are imposed on the past to make it controllable and enjoyable. And that’s just as true for the harrowing ‘war is hell’ type of film as it was for The Dirty Dozen and just as true of the revisionist ‘elegiac’ Western as for the old John Wayne kind. The revisionist Westerns tend to focus on the dying days of the ‘old West’ in grimly realistic detail, but while barely acknowledging the genocide and horror that is the real historical backdrop of the period. In a way, that’s fair enough – those stories are not about that subject – but when there are not only no (or very few) films about that subject, and it is barely even acknowledged by ‘official’ narratives of taught history, it’s a stark and telling omission.

It’s my personal feeling that nothing truly good is produced by adversity, or at least that if it is, that doesn’t offset what may have been lost. Which isn’t to deny that people are amazing, resourceful, resilient and inspiring; they are. If every golden age masks a dark age, it’s probably true too that every dark age is shot through with some elements of positivity, although I won’t scrutinise that statement too closely. Countries which were colonised by the British Empire (or indeed any empire) manage to grow and assert their independence and define their own cultures, which is good; but we can never know what or who was lost when their histories were derailed.

I love blues music (and indeed the whole phenomenon of western popular music which mostly grew from it), but again; we can never know what would have been, or what would exist now, had those creative energies not been re-directed by a couple of hundred years of slavery and exploitation. Individuals are capable of achieving almost superhuman feats of bravery and resourcefulness when facing adversity; escaping from abusers and kidnappers, rescuing people from disasters etc. But no-one in their right mind would – I hope – recommend that young people undergo these kinds of ordeals in order to fully achieve their potential.

I don’t think it’s particularly useful for individuals (although governments and institutions are a very different thing) to feel guilty about the deeds of the people of the past (or to be proud of the achievements of the past, really), but I also see no need to pretend that – for example – because India has a big railway network, the British Empire did something positive by oppressing the country’s people and culture and stealing its resources. Countries that weren’t colonised by the UK or Belgium or France or Russia have railways too. Nothing good came of the British in India. India survived anyway, just as people survive catastrophes everywhere and achieve amazing things in doing so. But you don’t celebrate an earthquake because people survive it and thrive afterwards.

So much for impersonal nostalgia – the personal kind is in many ways very similar, if less destructive. I’ve always been a nostalgic person; both for things I don’t remember, or that were long before ‘my time’ (you name it; silent movies, the 1960s, the Weimar Republic, Hong Kong cinema of the 70s, the Northern Renaissance, the Scottish Enlightenment, 80s teen movies) and, more naturally perhaps, for things within own experience. One of the things that initially made me write this was a reference in Anthony DeCurtis’ biography Lou Reed – A Life (John Murray, 2017)* about Reed’s 70s partner/muse Rachel, a fascinating figure who seems to have vanished into history. In Googling her I discovered various sites about vanishing/vanished aspects of New York and, because old photographs are endlessly fascinating, somehow segued from that to the vanished Jewish East End of London and the vanished and vanishing everything of everywhere. But if the Jewish East London of the 1960s and the underbelly of 70s New York are irretrievable, then so is one’s own childhood, not that one wants to retrieve it, exactly.

* It’s an excellent book, but one which illustrates some of my points; Lou Reed spent most of his adult life complaining about his conservative 1950s childhood, but DeCurtis himself has a more rose-tinted view of the period, saying “In stark contrast to the identity politics of today, assimilation was the order of the day…and none of Reed’s friends, Jewish or not, recall incidents of anti-Semitism or bias” (p.14) – fair enough you would think, except that just 22 pages later he also says, ‘Richard Mishkin was a fraternity brother of Allan Hyman’s in Sigma Alpha Mu, a so-called Jewish fraternity because at the time Jews were not permitted in many other fraternities.” (p.36)

Most of the polaroids etc that make up the ever-browsable (later note; but sadly diminished) Internet K-hole appear to be American, but any child of the 80s will recognise the texture and aura of the era we grew up in. When George Orwell wrote (I think in The Lion and the Unicorn, but I might be wrong; I’ll check) – “What have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person” he was putting his finger on one of the strange paradoxes of culture, heritage and nostalgia. The memories I have of the 1980s are made up of a distorted, child’s-eye view of events and culture which is truly mine, plus things I know now that I didn’t know then, plus other peoples’ memories, TV and films. The most potent sources of nostalgia seem to be – as the makers of shows like Stranger Things and Dark, and films like Super 8 and (too many to list) are very aware – the things you didn’t notice that you had noticed, the most ephemeral details; jingles from adverts, fonts, packaging, slang.

It’s an interesting point. The fleetingness with which you experience things has nothing to do with their power as memories. I have no idea what the first horror film I saw was, but I do know that a scene on some TV show where skinheads (or possibly a single skinhead) glued a man’s hands to the wall of a lift/elevator scared me as a child and stayed with me for a long time. Maybe that was because I used to see skinheads around on the streets (you had to watch the colour of the laces in their Doc Martens to see if they were ‘bad’ skinheads or not – though they were probably kids too, I now realise). I also know now (but didn’t then) that these were the second wave of skinheads, which is why I also saw Oi! written on various walls around the town; at the time I don’t think I ever made the connection. Again, when one thinks of the impact of very small occurrences it shows how impossible a really objective view of history is. I no longer bear any high school grudges, but without really thinking about it, there are many small and/or random sneers and insults from my youth that have stayed with me in vivid detail, along with the people and places involved. Similarly (but nicer) I will eternally feel grateful to two beautiful black girls in Camden in (I think) 1990 or 91 who made remarks to me which, even at the time were ‘not politically correct’ but which pleased me immensely; it is among the very few teenage memories that boosted rather than eroded my confidence. A tiny thing, barely even an ‘incident’, but a big deal to a painfully shy adolescent. What to make of such a minor, slightly embarrassing episode? I can still vividly remember – although it was not a rarity – my whole face burning when I blushed. People often remarked on the redness of my blushes and I remember – not even slightly nostalgically – being compared to a tomato, being told I looked like I would ‘burst’ etc at high school. And thinking about it, there’s no real conclusions to draw from that memory except that real nostalgia, unlike the nostalgia industry (“it was the 70s: Buckaroo!“, to quote Alan Partridge) is particular, not general. The Camden episode includes references to youth, gender, race etc, but it has nothing important to do with any those factors and I doubt if the two girls remembered it even days later. These are not the kinds of incidents which are worthy of a biographer’s attention; but they define my youth every bit as much as the music I listened to, the sweets I remember that no longer exist, or the clothes I wore.

My particular 80s nostalgia has less to do with “the 80s” in the sense it that it appears in TV shows and films as it does a litany of gloomy-sounding things: the urban decay of 60s and 70s council estates, indoor markets, army stores, arcades, brutalist churches that harmonised with those reinforced concrete towers that the fire brigade used for practise. This is a kind of eeriness as nostalgia; reflected in my liking for empty streets and art that represents empty streets: Algernon Newton, Maurice Utrillo, Takanori Oguiss , the photography of Masataka Nakano and taken to its extreme, Giorgio de Chirico, where the emptiness isn’t truly vacant so much as it is pregnant , reminding me always of – nostalgia again – the ruined city of Charn in CS Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew (by far my favourite Narnia book) – which made a huge impression on me as a child. Charn may even be where my liking for such things as ‘urbex’ photography, like that of Andre Govia, and of course, The Ruin, quoted way back in the first paragraph, comes from.

“The passing of time and all of its crimes, is making me sad again” – sadly, one of those crimes is that when I first heard that line (from Rubber Ring by The Smiths) in 1989 or thereabouts, Morrissey seemed to be on the side of the downtrodden and marginalised, whereas now he seems to be one of that increasing number of people who pretends that the mainstream of British culture is itself somehow being marginalised; which is not only patently ridiculous but impossible – and nostalgic, of course.

There’s a whole culture industry with its own cultural shorthand that has been constructed to bolster the standardised view of any given period. Nowadays, there’s whole genre of TV shows where any decade can be summed up by some B-list cultural commentator or celebrity (often not old enough to remember what they are “remembering”) saying “He/she/it were mad, weren’t they?” about some figurehead of the era. Not so great of course, when that figurehead turns out to be Jimmy Savile or Rolf Harris, at which point even nostalgia, like history, has to be revised.

The beauty of all nostalgia is that it’s selective. The 70s that Morrissey seems to feel nostalgic about (in the true, mixed feelings sense; witness the whole of Viva Hate, which I love) wasn’t ‘better’ than nowadays, but the writer of its songs was young then; he isn’t now. There are younger people who are also nostalgic about the 70s, or the 80s, because they see the partial versions of those era(s) preserved by those who were there then, or who pretend to have been. The people who mourn the loss of the blitz spirit are really no different from me wishing I’d seen the Beatles. The people who are nostalgic for the Empire will (hopefully) never have to deal with being in charge of a mass of powerless, subject people whose resources they are stealing (or be the subject of the same), but they can enjoy the things that Empire brought to all of our lives. The ‘glory’ of Empire, like the mythical ages of Greece and Rome, and the giants that the Anglo-Saxon poet pondered over, only exists now as the faded, distorted memory of a faded, distorted memory. Like the 70s, like the 80s, like the 2010s, like yesterday, they are wonderful and terrible because they can never come again.

Happy New Year!

A note on the text above: throughout this article (and many others) I refer to ‘people’ and ‘humankind’ in what is intended to be an inclusive kind of way, referring to people of all races, genders or indeed lack of gender. I probably also refer to gender in a binary sense, partly due to context, partly no doubt through laziness. However, I do have a tendency to not use the term ‘cis’, unless absolutely necessary – for me personally, the word ‘women’ includes trans women and the word men includes trans men. I don’t intend any offence by this, but I also don’t really mind if anyone is offended. I think it’s a shame that something as basic (if not simple) as a person’s gender should be a matter of opinion, but so it seems to be. My own view is that the contents of someone’s underwear is none of my business unless they explicitly make it so.

a reading of Orwell in the 21st century

I started writing this thing about George Orwell ages ago and never got it finished, but suddenly it seems possibly relevant, so here it is, not quite in the final form intended, extremely long-winded, but hopefully more-or-less coherent. I should also point out that lots of my own views are expressed here, because I can.

Sales of 1984 have risen sharply lately; but although there is definitely no wrong place to start reading Orwell, to me the most relevant of his works for the present day (coincidentally, also my favourite writings of his) are to be found in the four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, published by Penguin in the 60s and I assume still in print. I got the four volumes in a charity shop about fifteen years ago for 80 pence; as Orwell himself said about buying bound volumes of Punch, it was one of the best bargains I have ever had. I’ve read and re-read them more than almost any other books I own and there’s never a time when I can pick them up without finding something there to grip me.

The essays are also intensely relevant to this particular part of the 21st century, because the preoccupations that led to his writing 1984 and Animal Farm are there in their rawest form;

“The era of free speech is closing down. The freedom of the press in Britain was always something of a fake, because in the last resort, money controls opinion; still, so long as the legal right to say what you like exists, there are always loopholes for an unorthodox writer.” (Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party, 1938, vol 1, p. 373)

As it happened, the era of free speech never did quite close down (so far anyway), but it should be remembered that Hitler and even more so, Mussolini, were far from universally reviled in Britain, right up to the start of World War Two. As late as 1940, Orwell could write;

“It is a sign of the speed at which events are moving that Hurst and Blackett’s unexpurgated edition of Mein Kampf, published only a year ago, is edited from a pro-Hitler angle… He had crushed the German labour movement, and for that the property-owning classes were willing to forgive him almost anything.” (Vol 2, p 27)

“The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or Democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up.” The Lion and the Unicorn, 1940 (Vol 2, p. 92).

The idea of Fascism is very much still with us, but it’s interesting to find that, despite Mussolini’s explicit adoption of the word, it was no more clearly defined in 1944 than it is now;

“Except for the relatively small number of Fascist sympathisers, almost any English person would accept ‘bully’ as a synonym for ‘Fascist’. That is about as near to a definition as this much abused word has come.”
“…it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”
As I Please, 1944, vol. 3 p. 138-9

In fact, it’s surprising (and a bit alarming) to find just how relevant much of Orwell’s wartime writing is – the continuity of life in the UK is still, a world war and a sexual revolution later, surprisingly noticeable. For instance, a quote from the Daily Mail in 1932 shows that, despite being written and edited by entirely different people, the newspaper’s character has hardly changed almost a century later:

“With that rather morbid commiseration for fanatical minorities which is the rule with certain imperfectly informed sections of British public opinion, this country long shut its eyes to the magnificent work that the Fascist regime was doing. I have several times heard Mussolini himself express his gratitude to the Daily Mail as having been the first British newspaper to put his aims fairly before the world.” Daily Mail, quoted in Who Are The War Criminals?, 1943, vol 2, p. 365)

Orwell changes with the times. Much of the current referencing of Orwell has to do with language; ‘newspeak’ and government propaganda, whereas a few decades ago it was more to do with surveillance & ‘big brother,’ but he remains a constant source of reference, in a way that very few writers of his generation are. It’s noticeable that people nowadays seem, paradoxically, to be more sceptical than ever about the information given out by the media and government (which is in itself a fairly healthy thing) but also almost unbelievably credulous when it comes to any old nonsense that comes from unverified (mostly online) sources. This would not have surprised Orwell, who, reflecting on the ‘truth’ of the Spanish Civil war, wrote;

“Even if Franco is overthrown, what kind of records will the future historian have to go upon? And if Franco or anyone at all resembling him remains in power, the history of the war will consist quite largely of ‘facts’ which millions of people now living know to be lies. One of these ‘facts’ for instance, is that there was a considerable Russian army in Spain. There exists the most abundant evidence that there was no such army. Yet if Franco remains in power, and if Fascism in general survives, that Russian army will go into the history books and future schoolchildren will believe in it. So for practical purposes the lie will have become the truth.” As I Please, 1944, (vol.3 p. 110)

Also, the age of ‘nasty’ and ‘difficult’ women and ‘deplorable’ people would not have shocked him;

“Someone could write a valuable monograph on the use of question-begging names and epithets, and their effect in obscuring political controversies. It would bring out the curious fact that if you simply accept and apply to yourself a name intended as an insult, it may end by losing its insulting character.” As I Please, 1945, Vol 3 p.372

The moral of this seems to be that, if you want your insults to hurt, choose an epithet that no remotely normal person would embrace; easier said than done perhaps.

Orwell was writing in a time when political ideas, on both the extremes of left and right, were being expressed with absolute conviction, but without much sense of reality, let alone any humanistic thought. Orwell’s own writings are notable because above all else, he accepts the basic fact about human beings; we are all the same because we are all different. He was therefore an enemy of totalitarianism, because no abstract system of thought can allow for humanity in all its illogical, unpredictable variety. He was a socialist, but of an extremely undogmatic type, probably because his own upper class background (he was educated at Eton and was afterwards a member of the Imperial Indian Police in Burma) meant that his egalitarian beliefs were not obviously in his own interests. The fact that he had direct experience of the colonial system of rule meant that he couldn’t overlook – as most left-leaning political theorists did – the fact that the oppressed majority that made up the working class at home was mirrored by a far vaster, even more oppressed majority elsewhere. An early essay, A Hanging (1931) – based on his experiences as a policeman in Burma – is important for the development of his socialist beliefs because, as is the case in all of his writing, he confronts his own attitudes, rather than simply judging others’ attitudes based on the political system he has adopted. It’s also a brilliant piece of writing;

“He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.” (Vol 1, p.68-9)

The truth that he acknowledges here, that (to unfortunately/accidentally quote USA For Africa) ‘we are the world’, or more accurately but far more awkwardly – the world as we understand it is the result of our own perceptions of it – is to me a vitally important part of any political discussion. I have sometimes been a bit dubious of my belief in individualism, a philosophy (not that it is a philosophy to me really) which has often had right-wing (and always has selfish) connotations; but the (Conservative) Prime Minister attacked it recently, which is encouraging. To me – I have no idea if Orwell would have agreed – individualism automatically entails a wider humanistic view. The idea that if I am this particular collection of thoughts, feelings and perceptions suggests that other people, in their different ways, are this too. We are either all important or none of us are. 1984, Animal Farm and many of Orwell’s essays stress the loss of individualism in any Totalitarian philosophy. But while we still live in a relatively free society, his writing on the undercurrents that have their end point in totalitarianism are (to me) even more important. In 1945 he wrote;

“Nationalism, in the extended sense which I am using the word, includes such movements and tendencies as Communism, political Catholicism, Zionism, Antisemitism, Trotskyism and Pacifism. It does not necessarily mean loyalty to a government or a country, still less to one’s own country, and it is not even strictly necessary that the units in which it deals should actually exist. To name a few obvious examples, Jewry, Islam, Christendom, the Proletariat and the White Race are all of them the objects of passionate nationalistic feeling: but their existence can be seriously questioned, and there is no definition of any one of them that would be universally accepted.” Notes on Nationalism, 1945, vol 3, p. 412

This seems to me to hold as true now as it did then. Phrases of the moment, like ‘take our country back’ or ‘Make America Great Again’ are so open to interpretation as to be almost meaningless; but that doesn’t prevent people from taking them extremely seriously. This quote, from the same essay (and with the same disclaimer as to what he means by ‘nationalism’) seems even more appropriate;

“Nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feelings of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.” (p.418-9)

Orwell is – and he almost always is – careful to delineate exactly what he means when discussing issues such as nationalism, because then, as now, the world was full of people who wilfully misunderstand anything vaguely ambiguous that they don’t like the sound of. Then, as now too, there was a tendency, especially among extreme leftist groups, but not limited to them, to acknowledge one obvious wrong by pointing out other, similar and/or worse abuse, without addressing the original issue at all; evasive nonsense in fact. A recent example; it was World Holocaust Day, so people were naturally sharing a lot of stories about the experience of Jewish people in WW2 on TV and online. As one would expect, the moron minority of Nazis made their usual remarks* but the internet was also full of things like ‘think of that story and substitute ‘Jews’ for ‘Palestinians’” but how about, if you can’t just acknowledge one particular atrocity, substituting it for HUMAN BEINGS? It’s perfectly possible to – and I would say impossible not to – be appalled by the inhumane treatment of people by other people, whatever the origins of both parties. It is entirely possible to be critical (for example) of the policies of the Israeli government without extending that criticism to “Israel” or to Judaism; lots of Jewish people do it in fact. Just as it’s possible to criticise I.S. and Islamic extremism and Hamas without condemning Islam – lots of Muslims do that. It’s entirely possible to flag up the plight of Yemen (and its causes) without also ignoring and/or dismissing the plight of, say, Syria. Unless one has a specific quota of compassion that gets used up, it’s not only possible to do these things, it’s obvious and necessary. It’s important to be specific; the enemies of freedom always are.

*Holocaust denial by people who like the Nazis and don’t like Jews has to be among the most confusing and confused phenomena of our age. These people show their true colours by their assumption that the Holocaust would somehow be less bad if instead of 6 million, there was ‘only’ one million, or a few hundred thousand dead people at the end of it.

But it’s easy to point out the faults of one’s arch-enemies – it’s worth remembering that when Orwell wrote a review of F. Borkenau’s The Totalitarian Enemy in 1940, he was pointing out not only the truth about Nazi Germany, but also of Stalin’s Russia, which was still, at that point the main inspiration for British socialists, with whom Orwell himself was uncomfortably allied;

“As for the hate campaigns in which Totalitarian regimes ceaselessly indulge, they are real enough while they last, but are simply dictated by the needs of the moment. Jews, Poles, Trotskyists, English, French, Czechs, Democrats, Fascists, Marxists – almost anyone can figure as Public Enemy No. 1.”

“Simply in the interests of efficiency the Nazis found themselves expropriating, nationalizing, destroying the very people they had set out to save. It did not bother them, because their aim was simply power and not any particular form of society.” (Vol 2, p. 41)

It’s not surprising to find that, in the years surrounding the Second World War, Antisemitism was a particularly touchy issue. But again Orwell did not shy away from the fact that Britain itself had a long history of Antisemitic thought (which had in fact been considered entirely respectable in earlier generations) and that, although it seems contradictory, knowledge of the Holocaust initially made British Antisemitism worse because it made people ashamed of their own prejudices, rather than removing those prejudices;

“Whenever I have touched on the subject in a newspaper article, I have always had considerable ‘come-back’, and invariably some of the letters are from well-balanced, middling people – doctors for example – with no apparent economic grievance. These people always say (as Hitler says in Mein Kampf) that they started out with no anti-Jewish prejudice but were driven into their present position by mere observation of the facts. Yet one of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories which could not possibly be true.” Antisemitism in Britain, (vol 3 p. 385)

At the same time, Orwell’s belief in free speech was not diminished by the fact that people inevitably use it for a variety of ends. When, in 1949 Ezra Pound, a Fascist supporter in the 20s and 30s and a lifelong antisemite, was awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry despite his earlier ostracisation from the literary world, Orwell expressed his feelings in a response that still feels appropriate;

“Antisemitism… is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person. People who go in for that kind of thing must take the consequences.”
“I think the Bollingen Foundation were quite right to award Pound the prize, if they believed his poems to be the best of the year, but I also think that one ought to keep Pound’s career in memory and not feel that his ideas are made respectable by the mere fact of winning a literary prize…
“…since the judges have taken what amounts to an ‘art for art’s sake’ position, that is, the position that artistic integrity and common decency are two separate things, then at least let us keep them separate and not excuse Pound’s career on the ground that he is a good writer. He may be a good writer (I must admit that I personally have always regarded him as an entirely spurious writer), but the opinions that he has tried to disseminate by means of his works are evil ones, and I think that the judges should have said so more firmly when awarding him the prize.” (vol 4, p.552)

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, I have been reading these books for years now; but the fact is that reading them in the past decade has been a far less comfortable experience than it was before that. At the same time, the key subtexts running through Orwell’s work – especially the idea that political ideology is the enemy of individual freedom – remain important lessons to learn. And here I go off on my own tangent, but I’ll come back to Orwell eventually.
I have always been a left-wing liberal with some libertarian leanings and recent events have only confirmed me in my beliefs. More and more, it feels like no one, let alone any political party, can speak on my behalf. Which is a good thing – because the current surge in right-wing extremism has, weirdly, coincided with, on one hand, a willing shirking of responsibility from people who don’t like the things they themselves have voted for, and on the other, a willingness to project that responsibility onto others from the media and parts of the public. That was a long, badly-constructed and confusing sentence, so here’s a concrete example:

In the UK Brexit referendum (which I have zero desire to write about, but it’s an obvious reference point, as is the US presidential election), people voted for Brexit; some got what they wanted and others got what they wanted in theory, but didn’t like it afterwards. They then complained that they were lied to by politicians. This may be true, but it’s deeply disingenuous because –
1) people in the UK, for as long as I can remember, have ALWAYS assumed that politicians lie to them, and more importantly
2) even though the government at the time wanted Brexit and campaigned for it, they made no attempt whatsoever to prevent people from finding out the likely consequences of the vote, or in fact doing any kind of investigation for themselves. The people who complain they were misled and voted through ignorance are one small step away from saying that they shouldn’t be trusted to make important decisions. There are enough powerful people in the world who agree with that to make it a worrying sentiment.

At the same time, a certain part of the media colludes with these idiots. According to these kinds of broadcasters and newspapers the blame for (in this case) Brexit regret somehow lies neither with the people who voted for it, nor with the people who are supposed to have deceived them, but with the last 60 years of liberal thought – of people like Orwell in fact – who have sidelined the views of bigots and Nazis and tried selfishly to foist equality on the world. There are so many reasons this is bullshit, but the most obvious one is just logic. If you leave your front door open while you are out and someone steals your furniture and then police catch the burglar, who should go to prison? The burglar? You, for leaving your door unlocked? Or the rest of society for somehow failing to indoctrinate you in the art of door locking? And if that’s a false analogy (it is, a bit), it’s because the comparison between a positive thing; sixty years of striving towards equality among human beings, each as unique and important as the other, and a neutral thing – leaving one’s door unlocked, is ludicrous. Its patent ridiculousness highlights the malignancy of thought behind the pretence that progressive people have brought right wing extremism on themselves. Rather than making excuses for wilfully ignorant people, Orwell suggests what seems to me a far more sensible response (here in reference to the treatment of Polish and Jewish refugees in postwar Britain);

“I think it is a mistake to give such people the excuse of ignorance. You can’t actually change their feelings, but you can make them understand what they are saying when they demand that homeless refugees should be driven from our shores, and the knowledge may make them a little less actively malignant.” Tribune, 24 January 1947 (vol 4, p.316)

The nonsense spouted now in the press and elsewhere is not just stupidity, it’s stupidity with its own creepy conservative agenda and every day it feels like damage is being done to society by people pretending to speak on the behalf of others. A particularly annoying point because often these people are pretending to speak on the behalf of people like me. As a white, male, working class British person who wasn’t raised in a metropolitan area and still doesn’t live in one, the paternalistic statements continually being made by people who for the most part are metropolitan (no bad thing in itself) and aren’t working class (ditto) are far more oppressive to me than the idea that I should respect the people I have to share the earth with.

It may surprise the people who claim to be championing me, but even people of my class and background have TV, the internet and relatively high standards of literacy. I am not confused or outraged to see people of different races, genders/no gender or different faiths being represented in the media, even if I didn’t grow up in a particularly multicultural area. One of the many mistakes these kinds of commentators make is assuming firstly that the working class (though I belong to it I doubt if there really is such a thing still) is patriotic – which may or may not be true – and that patriotism is by its nature insular and/or xenophobic, which is far less obviously true. To me personally, it is 100% patriotic to want your country to be defined by inclusiveness, diversity & vibrant non-stagnant interactions with other cultures. Or to feel patriotic to the land as actual land and therefore to want to do as little damage to the material fabric of the country as possible. Patriotism was an important topic for Orwell; as he pointed out often, the British intelligentsia of the inter-war years were not only not patriotic, but tended to be embarrassed by appeals to patriotism, a dangerous thing in an era when the worst elements in the world were (and they still are) very aware of the power of appealing to nationalistic sentiment. Orwell’s work is often imbued with a love of Britain and British culture even though he was not at all blind to or uncritical of its inequalities. He was always careful, too, to separate patriotism from nationalism, which he abhorred.

“Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism… By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world, but which has no wish to force upon other people. Patriotism is defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose for every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself, but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.” Notes on Nationalism, 1945 (vol 3, p. 412)

“Patriotism has nothing to do with conservatism. It is devotion to something that is changing but is felt mystically to be the same.” My Country Right or Left, 1940 ( Vol 2, p.591)

He says a lot more on the subject, and really it’s worth reading his essays, because he is aware of the appeal of the things he doesn’t like in a way that is exceptionally rare in political journalism. My own disliking of nationalism has something to do with the (it seems to me) artificial divisions it seems to involve. I have been to several countries; all of them were beautiful, all of them had wonderful people and less wonderful people, all of them had interesting cultures, and were distinctively but at the same time not deeply different to my own culture. Also, nationalism seems to entail making generalisations which I’d rather not make. I am not someone who really likes belonging to things. I don’t like watching or participating in sports, I’m not interested in the monarchy. I don’t really enjoy being in any crowd that has a purpose (though oddly I quite like being in aimless crowds on streets etc) and while I am happy to support specific things and causes, when faced by a group with more than one aim – like a political party – I tend to be dubious.

I have a lot of sympathy for William Blake’s statement “To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.” Admittedly, Blake also wrote “a Horse is not more a Lion for being a Bad Horse”; but that’s genius for you. But I think he was right about generalising, though perhaps Mark Twain was even more right when he said in his smartass way “all generalizations are false, including this one.” I believe personally that valuing what is most individual about us is important, in part because it is impossible to have any kind of equality while seeing people as less than the equivalent of yourself. And it’s important, especially when so much of the media is willing to overlook the fact, to point out that civil defence movements like Black Lives Matter and groups like the Women’s Equality Party are doing no more (and no less) than insisting on something that almost everyone apart from the stupidest elements in society automatically agrees with; that humans are created equal. The only generalisation about humanity worth making is the platitude so perfectly coined by Depeche Mode; people are people. To categorise beyond that only diminishes the personhood (what a horrible word) of those you are talking about. Kristin Hersh puts it thusly;

“Is there a difference between male and female people? Is there? Seriously. I have yet to identify a single character trait I would attribute solely to one gender or the other.” (Rat Girl, 2010, p. 198)

Me either. Since I have descended into this kind of thing, here are some brief bullet pointed things that I believe, that I am sure not everyone agrees with. I list them for clarity, since at least 80% of this article is waffle:

Inclusivity isn’t a favour to be bestowed from on high to various groups out of all proportion with their numbers, it is exactly what every adult human being expects, and should be able to expect, from a healthy society.
People can and should think whatever they like; but states and governments should be concerned only about the welfare of all of the people that make up that society– otherwise why should those people contribute to it?
Cultures like that of Britain are not undermined by diversity. It is in their nature to be diverse, they always have been and always will be.
The simple idea that everyone is equal does not exclude anyone except for those who wish to exclude themselves, for whatever deluded reason.
Anyone who thinks that the advances in equality since the 60s have in some way altered society to the detriment of ‘ordinary’ people have a) been walking around with their eyes closed their whole life and b) have a narrow & distorted view of what ‘ordinary’ people are.
Other peoples’ rights are your rights. If people express themselves harmlessly in ways you don’t like, it’s none of your business.
there are ideas/philosophies that can’t be reconciled or compromised with. The worst people in history have always believed that, so everyone else has to, too.

ANYWAY: all this was mainly to say, if you are interested in George Orwell but haven’t read him, by all means read 1984 and Animal Farm, but if, as well as seeing a nightmare vision of where we could end up you also want insights into how the world got to where it is right now, as well as lots of interesting, funny and above all, well written articles on a variety of topics (not just politics, but popular culture, food and drink, murder, literature, to name a few), try his Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters.

“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as ours without wanting to change it.” Why I Joined the Independent Labour Party, 1938, (vol 1, p. 374)”

One of the appropriate responses to being alarmed by events is to do whatever it is you are good at doing in order to try to improve the situation; what Orwell did was to understand, and to write.

next… more inane stuff about music, thankfully