Orwell (5 page)

After Moulmein, Ali and I drove south to Amherst on a full-moon holiday. The market was closed, the boys played soccer, and many people, dressed in colorful clothing, visited the pagodas. Near Mudon, I saw the largest reclining Buddha in the world. Still unfinished and weirdly impressive, the concrete monster looked—from below—like a giant gray submarine. It too will eventually be plastered with layers of gold leaf. When passing a monastery on the way back to the main road, I saw a man incongruously hitting golf balls into an empty paddy.

At Thanbyuzayat, in a tidy park maintained by the British War Graves Commission, I saw the graves of hundreds of English, Australian, Dutch, Indian and Gurkha prisoners of war who died while building the BurmaSiam Railway for the Japanese. Some graves were of unknown soldiers, and one of the men had posthumously won the Victoria Cross. Officers had a
much better chance of survival, and most of the dead were young enlisted men. This sad and moving military cemetery recalled Kipling's story “The Gardener,” in which a grieving woman visits her lover's war grave amid a “merciless sea of black crosses.”

Amherst, a few miles south of the war graves, was an old colonial beach resort with a Brighton-like pagoda pier extending into the sea on stilts. At the pagoda, I was amazed to meet someone I knew. The Moulmein police chief, now on a short pilgrimage and surrounded by barefoot policemen with guns slung over their shoulders, greeted me warmly. The beach was flooded and muddy during the monsoon season, so I dashed through the heavy shower to a modest Chinese restaurant, the best there was, where I dined on soup and noodles for a dollar.

The road through Pa-an on the way back to Rangoon was now impassable, so we took the ferry to Martaban, where the muddy river showed through the rust holes of the deck. I remembered Kipling's lines: “And the wildest dreams of Kew are the facts of Khatmandhu, / And the crimes of Clapham chaste in Martaban.” But in that swampy, sleepy village, I saw no signs of prodigious depravity or sexual corruption, and Ali bounced off the ferry with his usual enthusiasm.

Everyone I had met in Rangoon told me that I had to visit the Golden Rock Pagoda at Kyaiktiyo, but they were all terribly vague about how to get there. Ali, swerving to avoid a few more obstacles, turned off the main road and drove to the base camp, which was as far as cars were allowed to go. Once there, I joined forces with an Israeli couple and three Spanish women, who were not at all surprised to find a Spanish-speaking American in the wilds of Burma. We negotiated a price of two dollars each for a thrilling half-hour truck ride up steep mountain passes and over torrential streams to the end of the road. I took a room (and was, once again, the only guest in the hotel) just above the truck stop. As in Moulmein, they refused to take traveler's checks or credit cards, and I had to pay in U.S. dollars. The others set off for the summit, where there was another place to stay.

I was mobbed by porters and bearers who offered to carry me—a humiliating alternative to hiking—up to the top. They followed me as I climbed the steep hill in the heavy rain, which quickly soaked my clothes and skin. Fog obscured the magnificent views on this one-hour via dolorosa. When I reached the top, I had to give my passport number and pay six dollars to enter what seemed, after all the shops along the way, to be the headquarters of Buddha, Inc. I proceeded with bare feet across the perilously wet, slippery tiled floor and, perched on a tilting rock, finally took a photo of the famed pagoda. The Israeli engineer I'd met, suddenly appearing out of the
fog, explained that the rock was held like a ball-and-socket and may also have had a lead weight to balance the strange tilt.

As he berated his wife for dragging him to this Buddha-haunted peak, I wondered why travel maniacs suffered great expense and extreme discomfort to see such inevitably disappointing sites. Burma is dilapidated, its people oppressed and rather unhappy, and once you leave the cruise ship, traveling there is exhausting. But the greater the hardship, the more memorable the experience. Unique, almost untouched by tourism, its rural regions still pristine, the country is for travelers who have done it all. It is now possible to stay for a month and visit places north of Mandalay and south of Rangoon that have been closed since 1948. There's still time to see the most remote, traditional and mysterious part of Asia before revolution, prosperity or Chinese dominance destroys the old way of life.

My first essay on Orwell began with a contrast between Orwell and Henry Miller. I then defined Orwell as a man of letters and man of war, and showed his kinship to the themes of guilt, sense of responsibility and need for commitment of his French contemporaries in the 1930s, Malraux and Sartre.

Passing through Paris on his way to fight in Spain in 1936, Orwell stopped to meet Henry Miller, whose books he had reviewed and admired. Miller cared nothing for the Spanish War, and forcibly told Orwell, who was going to combat Fascism and defend democracy “from a sense of obligation,” that he was an idiot.
¹
This striking confrontation reveals the polarity of political attitudes among modern writers. If Miller, as Orwell later wrote, is undoubtedly “inside the whale”—performing “the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive,
accepting
”—then Orwell himself is clearly “outside the whale,” responsible, active, rejecting the horrors of the modern world and committing himself to change them.
²
He is part of the collective tragedy and shares in the collective guilt, and he would agree with Dostoyevsky that “every one is really responsible to all men for all men and for everything.”
³
Spain was the magnet that attracted such crusaders as Orwell, Hemingway and Malraux—intellectual men of letters who are also courageous men of war, the very incarnation of the heroes they create in their books.

Orwell is a literary nonconformist whose works defy genres, a writer who is hard to place. His satiric style has been likened to that of Swift, Butler and Shaw. He has affinities with the school of the great plain writers Defoe, Crabbe and Gissing—the writers of working-class realism, of human beings in conflict with the class structure. He has some similarities to the Auden-Spender school of the Thirties, though he was unsympathetic to them.
⁴

But more important than any of these influences and traditions, I think, is Orwell's close kinship—in his intense feeling of guilt, responsibility and commitment—to the French novelists, particularly Malraux and Sartre, who began to write during the interwar years, the “age of guilt.” They have been perceptively analyzed by Victor Brombert, who states that those French writers “who reached the age of reason around 1930, have suffered from a near-pathological guilt complex, and are haunted by what Paul Nizan has called the ‘social original sin.' … The further removed from the scene of human anguish, the greater the self-reproach, the more persistent the feeling of responsibility…. Their message is permanent accusation. Silence in the face of social injustice or political tyranny is for them a shameful
act
, a manner of collaborating with evil. To give society a ‘bad conscience' is, according to Sartre, the writer's first duty.”
⁵

It is not difficult to relate Orwell's ideas and ideals to those of the French writers. The evolution of his first novel,
Burmese Days
(1934), is an illustrative example, though many of his works attacking Fascism, Communism or capitalism would serve equally well.
⁶
Orwell spent five years as a policeman in Burma, and he was responsible for the kicking, flogging, torturing and hanging of men. He saw the dirty work of Empire at close quarters and “the horribly ugly, degrading scenes which offend one's eyes all the time in the starved countries of the East” where an Indian coolie's leg is often thinner than an Englishman's arm.
⁷

By the end of the five years, writes Orwell, “I hated the imperialism I was serving with a bitterness which I probably cannot make clear … it is not possible to be a part of such a system without recognizing it as an unjustifiable tyranny…. I was conscious of an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate.”
⁸
Orwell managed to relieve this intense guilt in two ways. He resigned his position and to expiate his country's political sin submerged himself among the oppressed poor of Paris and London and took their side against tyrants by becoming one of the common people. For obvious reasons of caste and race this kind of masochistic submergence was impossible in Asia, but for Orwell the European working classes “were the symbolic victims of injustice, playing the same part in England as the Burmese played in Burma.”
⁹
Orwell also relieved his guilt through creative exorcism, for he writes that “the landscapes of Burma, which, when I was among them, so appalled me as to assume the qualities of a nightmare, afterwards stayed so hauntingly in my mind that I was obliged to write a novel about them to get rid of them.”
¹⁰
This accounts for the novel's passionate and didactic quality.

The central political principle in
Burmese Days
derives from Montesquieu who wrote in
The Spirit of the Laws
, “If a democratic republic subdues a nation in order to govern them as subjects, it exposes its own liberty.”
¹¹
The
truth of this principle is illustrated by the Burmese judge U Po Kyin, who is clearly modeled on the physical characteristics of the Malay chief Doramin in Conrad's
Lord Jim
, for both Orientals are lavishly dressed, enormously fat, need assistance to rise from their chairs and habitually confer with their wives.
¹²
U Po is the
primum mobile
of all events in the novel, an underling who has the most actual power in the English outpost of progress and through devious machinations controls even his rulers. He slanders the Deputy Commissioner Macgregor, ruins the Indian Dr. Veraswami, incites a rebellion in which two men are eventually killed and six imprisoned, and drives the hero, Flory, to suicide. A fair sample of a Burmese magistrate, U Po has advanced himself by thievery, bribery, blackmail and betrayal, and his corrupt career is a serious criticism of both the British rule that permits his success and his British superiors who so disastrously misjudge his character.

The object of U Po's intrigues and the Nirvana for which he pines is the English Club, the last fortress of white insularity. Orwell's ironic juxtaposition of “native” and English social scenes (which he observed in A
Passage to India
) reveals the sleazy Club just after U Po's fabulous wish. Besides Flory, the British colony consists of the bigoted and malicious Ellis, the drunken and lecherous Lackersteen, his scheming and snobbish wife, the bloodthirsty and stupid Westfield, the boring and pompous Macgregor, the innocuous and inoffensive Maxwell and, later on, the arrogant and cruel Verrall. Orwell's work is unlike Forster's novel; there are no redemptive characters in his essentially negative and pessimistic novel, only the “dull boozing witless porkers” who observe the five beatitudes of the pukka sahib and exploit the country. They strive to impose the “Pox Britannica” which, prophesies Flory, will eventually wreck “the whole Burmese national culture. We're not civilising them, we're only rubbing our dirt on to them” (37).
¹³

These are the views that Flory presents in his everlasting argument with his friend Dr. Veraswami, a loyal British subject who always defends imperialism and who also aspires to Club membership as protective prestige against his enemies. Flory reveals his moral weakness by first refusing to support his friend's nomination and then allowing himself to be coerced into signing a statement against native members. Like Orwell, Flory hates to see the English humiliating the Asians, and is ashamed of the imperialist exploitation and class distinctions. But he recognizes that “even friendship can hardly exist when every white man is a cog in the wheels of despotism” (61).

This connection between political oppression and private guilt has been acutely described by Nietzsche, who wrote that “political superiority without any real human superiority is most harmful. One must seek to make amends for political superiority. To be
ashamed
of one's power.”
¹⁴
Flory, of course,
is ashamed, but his failure to come to terms with the intolerable colonial situation is symbolized by his hideous birthmark (as much a sign of guilt, a mark of Cain, as an indication of his isolation and alienation), but also by his failure to mediate between the three worlds of Burma: the English, the “native” and the natural world of the jungle.

The second third of the novel begins with the arrival of the shallow and selfish Elizabeth Lackersteen, whom the desperate Flory sees as the only salvation from his Burmese misery. But they are unable to communicate in a meaningful way, and Flory's efforts to introduce Elizabeth to the Burmese world of dance plays and marketplaces, to make her appreciate and admire the country as he does, result only in insulting his Oriental friends and revolting Elizabeth, who prefers English society. Nevertheless, their parabolic courtship progresses in a series of physical adventures: they meet as Flory rescues Elizabeth from a water buffalo, decide to marry first after shooting a leopard and again after Flory's heroic swim to rescue the besieged Club members, when the rioting Burmese all want to “get into” the Club.

Their only communion occurs during the central hunting episode. Flory teaches Elizabeth to shoot and she kills the beautiful jade pigeons that he had previously observed while peacefully performing a Thoreau-like baptism in the lonely jungle. He had sought refuge and relief there from the anguish of penitential solitude and guilt. When the limp, warm and iridescent fowl is placed in Elizabeth's hand, her desire for Flory is awakened, and the connection between sexual passion and destructive violence (foreshadowing Flory's suicide) is subtly revealed. Soon afterwards Flory shoots a male leopard and his gift of the skin silently seals their troth. Later on, this ruined leopard skin, like Flory's disfigured skin, is both a cause and a symbol of Elizabeth's disaffection.