All Art Is Propaganda Read Free Page A

they become the
Daily
Worker,
but, since it's all the same to the boys so long as the death rays are present, that a more leftist perspective couldn't hurt.
    For the Orwell of the early essays, the case of Henry Miller is the tough one. Because while Dickens's politics are in the end congenial enough, Miller's quietism is less so. "I first met Miller at the end of 1936, when I was passing through Paris on my way to Spain," writes Orwell. "What most intrigued me about him was to find that he felt no interest in the Spanish war whatever. He merely told me in forcible terms that to go to Spain at that moment was the act of an idiot." Orwell nonetheless went to Spain, and fought there. He was a writer who felt it was vital to let politics animate his work; Miller was the opposite. As Orwell puts it in perfect Orwell deadpan: "When
Tropic of Cancer
was published the Italians were marching into Abyssinia and Hitler's concentration-camps were already bulging. The intellectual foci of the world were Rome, Moscow and Berlin. It did not seem to be a moment at which a novel of outstanding value was likely to be written about American dead-beats cadging drinks in the Latin Quarter." And yet, as Orwell suggests, someone this unfashionable had to be working under the spell of a profound conviction. He contrasts Miller favorably to W. H. Auden, who at this time in the famous poem "Spain" was miming the thoughts of the good party man about the "necessary murder." Miller is so far removed from this sort of sentiment, so profound is his individualism and his conviction, that Orwell comes close to endorsing it—"Seemingly there is nothing left but quietism—robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale—or rather, admit that you are inside the whale (for you
are,
of course)." Except Orwell doesn't really mean this. He may be inside the whale but he does not intend to stop disturbing its digestion, he does not intend to be any more quietistic—in fact, just a few months later, in one of his eccentric moods, Orwell was drawing up a scheme for the guerrilla defense of the island, in case the Germans landed, and trying to get it to the government. What he admired above all in Miller was his willingness to go against the grain of the time. While all art is propaganda, it needn't necessarily propagandize something correct. The important thing is that the writer himself believe it.
    But there are certain things—here is where Orwell begins to extend and then to contradict his thinking—that you simply can't believe. "No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition," he asserts. Is that true? At almost the exact same moment, Jean-Paul Sartre (a writer Orwell thought, incorrectly, was "full of air"), in
What Is Literature?
was writing, "Nobody can suppose for a moment that it is possible to write a good novel in praise of anti-Semitism." Is
that
true? It seems to have been a problem that leftist writers of the 1940s were going to face by sheer bluff assertion. For Orwell the number of beliefs hostile to literary production seemed to expand and expand. Eliot's "Four Quartets" is labeled "Petainist"—a fairly strong term to hurl at a long experimental poem that doesn't even rhyme. And Salvador Dalí, in "Benefit of Clergy," is a "rat." Orwell wants to chart a middle course between the philistines who would dismiss Dalí out of hand for his outrages and the aesthetes unable even to acknowledge the problem, but Orwell's own trouble is that he loathes Dalí, above all for abandoning France in its moment of danger. After asserting that the painter is more talented than most of the people who would denounce his morals, Orwell proceeds to denounce those morals, and the morals of those who enjoy Dalí's paintings.
    As the war goes on, then ends, Orwell's sense of peril grows sharper, and he looks at literature in a different way. He comes to think that no matter who wins, the world