All Art Is Propaganda (51 page)
Read All Art Is Propaganda Online
Authors: George Orwell
1. Tulips seem to have originated in Turkey. A mania for them struck Holland in the seventeenth century with devastating financial results. In Alkmaar, in 1639, 120 tulip bulbs were sold for 90,000 florins; a single bulb, the Viceroy, fetched 4,203 guilders. In the eighteenth century, such was the economic damage being caused, the government stopped the tulip traffic. Orwell may have known the novel,
La Tulipe Noire
(1850) by Alexandre Dumas. An abridged version was often set for schoolboys to read (in French).
2. George Warwick Deeping (see
n. 28,367.
), prolific and popular novelist. Perhaps his best-known work is
Sorrell and Son
(1925; New York, 1926). In
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
it looks as if Orwell originally intended to have Gordon Comstock call the novels of Warwick Deeping and of Ethel M. Dell "garbage." This was, however, suppressed on legal advice.
*
Hard Times
was published as a serial in
Household Words
and
Great Expectations
and
A Tale of Two Cities
in
All the Year Round.
Forster says that the shortness of the weekly instalments made it "much more difficult to get sufficient interest into each." Dickens himself complained of the lack of "elbow-room." In other works, he had to stick more closely to the story [Orwell's footnote].
***
*Dickens turned Miss Mowcher into a sort of heroine because the real woman whom he had caricatured had read the earlier chapters and was bitterly hurt. He had previously meant her to play a villainous part. But
any
action by such a character would seem incongruous [Orwell's footnote].
***
*From a letter to his youngest son (in 1868): "You will remember that you have never at home been harassed about religious observances, or mere formalities. I have always been anxious not to weary my children with such things, before they are old enough to form opinions respecting them. You will therefore understand the better that I now most solemnly impress upon you the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself, and the impossibility of your going far wrong if you humbly but heartily respect it ... Never abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it" [Orwell's footnote].
***
*This was written some months before the outbreak of war. Up to the end of September 1939 no mention of the war has appeared in either paper [Orwell's footnote].
***
*Published in 1932 [Orwell's footnote]. Edited by Michael (William Edward) Roberts (1902â1948).
***
*The Secret Life of Salvador Dali
(the Dial Press, New York) [Orwell's footnote].
***
*Dali mentions
L'Age d'Or
and adds that its first public showing was broken up by hooligans, but he does not say in detail what it was about. According to Henry Miller's account of it, it showed among other things some fairly detailed shots of a woman defaecating [Orwell's footnote].
***
*In spite of this, Common Wealth has adopted the astonishingly feeble slogan: "What is morally wrong cannot be politically right" [Orwell's footnote].
***
*
Raffles, A Thief in the Night
and
Mr. Justice Raffles,
by E. W. Hornung. The third of these is definitely a failure, and only the first has the true Raffles atmosphere. Hornung wrote a number of crime stories, usually with a tendency to take the side of the criminal. A successful book in rather the same vein as
Raffles
is
Stingaree
[Orwell's footnote].
***
*1945. Actually Raffles does kill one man and is more or less consciously responsible for the death of two others. But all three of them are foreigners and have behaved in a very reprehensible manner. He also, on one occasion, contemplates murdering a blackmailer. It is, however, a fairly well-established convention in crime stories that murdering a blackmailer "doesn't count" [Orwell's footnote].
***
*1945. Another reading of the final episode is possible. It may mean merely that Miss Blandish is pregnant. But the interpretation I have given above seems more in keeping with the general brutality of the book [Orwell's footnote].
***
*They are said to have been imported into this country as ballast, which accounted for their low price and crumpled appearance. Since the war the ships have been ballasted with something more useful, probably gravel [Orwell's footnote].
***
*It is fair to say that the P.E.N. Club celebrations, which lasted a week or more, did not always stick at quite the same level. I happened to strike a bad day. But an examination of the speeches (printed under the title
Freedom of Expression
) shows that almost nobody in our own day is able to speak out as roundly in favour of intellectual liberty as Milton could do 30c years agoâand this in spite of the fact Milton was writing in a period of civil war [Orwell's footnote].
***
*An interesting illustration of this is the way in which the English flower names which were in use till very recently are being ousted by Greek ones,
snapdragon
becoming
antirrhinum, forget-me-not
becoming
myosotis,
etc. It is hard to see any practical reason for this change of fashion: it is probably due to an instinctive turning-away from the more homely word and a vague feeling that the Greek word is scientific [Orwell's footnote].
***
*Example: "Comfort's catholicity of perception and image, strangely Whitmanesque in range, almost the exact opposite in aesthetic compulsion, continues to evoke that trembling atmospheric accumulative hinting at a cruel, an inexorably serene timelessness.... Wrey Gardiner scores by aiming at simple bullseyes with precision. Only they are not so simple, and through this contented sadness runs more than the surface bitter-sweet of resignation"
(Poetry Quarterly)
[Orwell's footnote].
***
*One can cure oneself of the
not un-
formation by memorizing this sentence:
A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field
[Orwell's footnote].
***
*Houyhnhnms too old to walk are described as being carried in "sledges" or in "a kind of vehicle, drawn like a sledge." Presumably these had no wheels [Orwell's footnote].
***
*The physical decadence which Swift claims to have observed may have been a reality at that date. He attributes it to syphilis, which was a new disease in Europe and may have been more virulent than it is now. Distilled liquors, also, were a novelty in the seventeenth century and must have led at first to a great increase in drunkenness [Orwell's footnote].
***
*Tower [Orwell's footnote].
***
*At the end of the book, as typical specimens of human folly and viciousness, Swift names "a Lawyer, a Pickpocket, a Colonel, a Fool, a Lord, a Gamester, a Politician, a Whore-master, a Physician, an Evidence, a Suborner, an Attorney, a Traitor, or the like." One sees here the irresponsible violence of the powerless. The list lumps together those who break the conventional code, and those who keep it. For instance, if you automatically condemn a colonel, as such, on what grounds do you condemn a traitor? Or again, if you want to suppress pickpockets, you must have laws, which means that you must have lawyers. But the whole closing passage, in which the hatred is so authentic, and the reason given for it so inadequate, is somehow unconvincing. One has the feeling that personal animosity is at work [Orwell's footnote].
***
*Shakespeare and the Drama.
Written about 1903 as an introduction to another pamphlet,
Shakespeare and the Working Classes,
by Ernest Crosby [Orwell's footnote].
***
*
The Story of my Experiments with Truth,
by M. K. Gandhi. Translated from the Gujarati by Mahadev Desai. Public Affairs Press, $5.00 [Orwell's footnote].