Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) (6 page)

At the poem’s centre is a debate about ‘exact thinking’, and how such thinking translates into action, and whether emotion as opposed to reason is ever a justifiable ground for action, and whether action is ever worth it in the first place – though of course if it were to be so, then it must first be based on absolutely exact thinking – and, as any sensible reader will swiftly deduce, this is exactly the sort of overanalytical ‘pother’ (Claude’s word) which is most discouraging to a woman who might be inclined to think that you might be inclined to be in love with her. If Clough’s view of Rome is post-Romantic, Claude as a lover relates less to any Byronic predecessors than to those indecisive, self-conscious, paralysed creatures who inhabit nineteenth-century Russian fiction. Claude is ‘too shilly-shally’, observes Georgina, while he himself comes to regret (in another un-Arnoldian phrase) his ‘fiddle-faddling’. Claude epitomises how disastrous it is for a lover to see the other side of the question, and to remind himself of the advantages of not being in love: ‘Yet, at the worst of the worst, books and a chamber remain’ – a line which is an eerie pre-echo of Larkin’s renunciatory ‘Poetry of Departures’: ‘Books; china; a life / Reprehensibly perfect.’

So
Amours de Voyage –
this great long poem which is also a great short novella – is in the end about failure, about not seizing the day, about misreading and overanalysing, about cowardice. But cowardice is generally more interesting to the writer than courage, as failure is more exciting than success; and perhaps – as Claude observes in one of his more chilling rationalisations – perhaps the need for kindness precludes the getting of it.

As for success:
Amours de Voyage
was first published in
The Atlantic Monthly
in 1858; and writers today, as they fret about royalties and advances and reading fees and PLR and copyright and agents and status, might reflect that this was the only occasion in his entire life when Clough received the slightest payment for any poem that he wrote.

Y
OU HAVE TO
feel a little sorry for Mr and Mrs Vaughan Wilkes, or ‘Sambo’ and ‘Flip’ as they were known to their charges. During the first decades of the twentieth century, they ran a preparatory school on the south coast of England. It was no worse than many other such establishments: the food was bad, the building underheated, physical punishment the norm. Pupils learned ‘as fast as fear could teach us’, as one alumnus later wrote. The day began with a frigid and fetid plunge bath; boys denounced one another to the authorities for homosexual practices; and daily morale was dependent on whether a boy was in or out of favour with Flip. In some ways the school was better than many: it had a good academic record; Sambo nurtured contacts at the most important public schools, especially Eton; and clever boys from decent families were accepted on half fees. This was a calculated act of generosity: in return, the boys were meant to reward the school by gaining academic distinction.

Often, this worked, and the Wilkeses might have had reason to congratulate themselves, in the early years of the First World War, for having admitted on reduced terms the sons of Major Matthew Connolly, a retired army officer, and Richard Blair, a former civil servant in the Opium Department of the government of India. The two boys, Cyril and Eric, each won the Harrow Prize (a nationwide history competition), and then took scholarships to Eton in successive years. The Wilkeses
must have thought their investments had paid off, the accounts balanced and closed.

But Englishmen of a certain class – especially those sent away to boarding schools – tend towards obsessive memory, looking back on those immured years either as an expulsion from the familial Eden, and a traumatic introduction to the concept of alien power, or else the opposite, a golden and protected time before life’s realities intrude. And so, just as the Second World War was about to begin, the Wilkeses, much to their distaste, became a matter of public discussion and argument. Major Connolly’s boy, young Cyril – renamed ‘Tim’ at St Cyprian’s, and given the school character of an Irish rebel (if a tame one) – published
Enemies of Promise
. While describing in some detail the harshness and cruelty of the lightly disguised ‘St Wulfric’s’, Connolly also admitted that, as preparatory schools went, it had been ‘a well-run and vigorous example which did me good’. Flip was ‘able, ambitious, temperamental and energetic’. Connolly, who leaned towards Edenic moralising (especially about Eton), recalled the vivid pleasures of reading, natural history and homoerotic friendship. He devoted several wistful pages to the latter subject.
Enemies of Promise
, published in 1938, must have felt to the Wilkeses as damaging as the fire which burnt St Cyprian’s to the ground the following year. Flip wrote Connolly a ‘Dear Tim’ letter about the harm he had done to ‘two people who did a very great deal for you’, adding that the book had ‘hurt my husband a lot when he was ill and easily upset’.

For the next thirty years, the debate continued as to the true nature of the Wilkeses – diligent pedagogues or manipulative sadists – and as to the wider consequences of sending small boys away from home at the age of eight: character-building or character-deforming? The photographer Cecil Beaton had been at St Cyprian’s at the same time as Connolly and Blair, surviving on charm and the ability to placate by singing ‘If you were the only girl in the world, and I were
the only boy’. He applauded Connolly for having ‘seen through all the futilities and snobbishness of Flip and her entourage’. Others joined in, like the naturalist Gavin Maxwell, and the golf correspondent Henry Longhurst, a stout defender of Flip as ‘the most formidable, distinguished and unforgettable woman I am likely to meet in my lifetime’. Connolly later came to regret what he had written. When Flip died in August 1967 at the age of ninety-one, he turned up at her funeral, doubtless expecting sentimental reunion, the rheumy eye and the forgiving handshake. Not a bit of it. The Major’s boy had turned out a bad egg and a bounder, as literary types often do. Connolly self-pityingly noted that ‘nobody spoke to me’.

Yet Flip’s death merely led to the most savage and contentious contribution to the debate. Ten years after
Enemies of Promise
, Eric Blair, by then George Orwell, wrote his essay ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, as a pendant to Connolly’s account. It was never published in Britain during his lifetime, or Flip’s, for fear of libel; but it did come out in the States, in the
Partisan Review
, in 1952. Longhurst picked up a copy of the magazine in Honolulu, and was ‘so shocked that I have never read it again’. Forty years after it was first published in Britain, sixty years after it was composed, and now almost a century after the events it describes, ‘Such, Such’ retains immense force, its clarity of exposition matched by its animating rage. Orwell does not try to backdate his understanding; he retains the inchoate emotional responses of the young Eric Blair to the system into which he had been flung. But now, as George Orwell, he is in a position to anatomise the economic and class infrastructure of St Cyprian’s, and those hierarchies of power which the pupil would later meet in grown-up, public, political form: in this respect such schools were truly named ‘preparatory’.

Orwell also writes with the unhealed pain of an abused child, a pain which occasionally leaks into the prose. He
describes a younger pupil – aristocratic and thus entitled to privileges denied to half-fees Blair – like this: ‘a wretched, drivelling little creature, almost an albino, peering upwards out of weak eyes, with a long nose at the end of which a dewdrop always seemed to be trembling’. When this boy had a choking fit at dinner, ‘a stream of snot ran out of his nose onto his plate in a horrible way to see. Any lesser person would have been called a dirty little beast and ordered out of the room instantly.’ Orwell’s denunciatory fervour is counterproductive; readers may well feel sorry for the little chap whose hair colour, nasal explosions and accident of birth were none of his doing.

If Connolly was by his own admission a tame rebel at St Cyprian’s, Orwell was a true one: Connolly wrote that Blair ‘alone among the boys was an intellectual, and not a parrot’. And if the child is father to the man, the writer’s account of his own childhood is often a sure guide to his adult mentality. (At St Cyprian’s Blair denounced boys for homosexuality – ‘one of the contexts in which it was proper to sneak’. Decades later, during the Cold War, Orwell sneaked on the politically unreliable to the Foreign Office.) ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ is about life in an English preparatory school; but it is also about politics, class, Empire and adult psychology. And the writer’s mature views on these subjects feed into his corrective vehemence:

The same typist who produced the final, fair copy of ‘Such, Such’ also typed a draft of
Nineteen Eighty-Four
; both the cadences, and the message, of those two sentences must have made her feel the overlap.

The Queen of England, advised by her government, appoints knights and peers; the nation at large, by more informal means, appoints national treasures. To achieve this status, it is not sufficient just to be outstanding in your profession; you need to reflect back some aspect of how the country imagines itself to be. (You also mustn’t be seen to be chasing the title too hard.) Typically, national treasures tend to be actors or sportsfolk or, increasingly, those made famous by television. It is hard for living writers to become NTs, but not impossible. Charm is important; so is the capacity not to threaten, not to be obviously clever; you should be perceptive but not too intellectual. A most successful national treasure of the last century was John Betjeman, whose genial, bumbly appearances on television overcame the handicap of his being a poet. Someone like Betjeman’s contemporary Evelyn Waugh could never have become a treasure – too rude, too openly contemptuous of those whose opinions he despised. Postulants for treasuredom are allowed to have political views, but must never appear angry, or self-righteous, or superior. In recent times, the two writers to attain unarguable NT status have been John Mortimer and Alan Bennett: both old-fashioned liberals, but managing to exude the sense that if confronted by a rabid crypto-fascist Little Englander, they would offer a glass of champagne (in Mortimer’s case) or a steaming mug of cocoa (in Bennett’s) and then search for common ground in uncontentious topics.

When it comes to the dead, it is hard to retain, or posthumously acquire, treasuredom. Being a Great Writer in itself has little to do with the matter. The important factors are: 1) An ambassadorial quality, an ability to present the nation to itself, and represent it abroad, in a way it wishes to be presented and represented. 2) An element of malleability and interpretability. The malleability allows the writer to be given a more appealing, if not entirely untruthful, image; the interpretability means that we can all find in him or her more or less whatever
we require. 3) The writer, even if critical of his or her country, must have a patriotic core, or what appears to be one.

Thus Dickens, as Orwell observed, is ‘one of those writers who are worth stealing’ (by ‘Marxists, by Catholics and, above all, by Conservatives’). He also fulfils criterion 3: ‘Dickens attacked English institutions with a ferocity that has never since been approached. Yet he managed to do it without making himself hated, and, more than this, the very people he attacked have swallowed him so completely that he has become a national institution himself.’ Something similar has happened with Trollope, who – partly through relentless TV adaptations, but also because he invented the pillar box – hovers on the edge of being a national treasure. This near-status has been greatly helped by the public support of two Trollope-reading Tory prime ministers, Harold Macmillan and John Major – despite the fact that Trollope hated Tories.

And George Orwell? It would surprise, and doubtless irritate, him to discover that since his death in 1950 he has moved implacably towards NT status. He is interpretable, malleable, ambassadorial and patriotic. He denounced the Empire, which pleases the left; he denounced communism, which pleases the right. He warned us against the corrupting effect on politics and public life of the misuse of language, which pleases almost everyone. He said that ‘Good prose is like a windowpane’, which pleases those who, despite living in the land of Shakespeare and Dickens, mistrust ‘fancy’ writing.
*
He was dubious of anyone who was too ‘clever’. (This is a key English suspicion, most famously voiced in 1961 when Lord Salisbury, a stalwart of the imperialist Tory right, denounced Iain Macleod, Secretary of State for the Colonies
and member of the new reforming Tory left, as ‘too clever by half’.) Orwell used ‘sophisticated’ and ‘intellectual’ and ‘intelligentsia’ as terms of dispraise, hated Bloomsbury, and not just expected but hoped that the sales of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
would outlast those of Virginia Woolf. He was scathing about social elites, finding the ruling class ‘stupid’. In 1941 he declared that Britain was the most class-ridden country on earth, ruled by ‘the old and silly’, ‘a family with the wrong members in control’; yet he also recognised that the ruling class was ‘
morally
fair and sound’ and in time of war ‘ready enough to get themselves killed’. He describes the condition of the working class with sympathy and rage, thought them wiser than intellectuals, but didn’t sentimentalise them; in their struggle they were as ‘blind and stupid’ as a plant struggling towards the light.

Orwell is profoundly English in even more ways than these. He is deeply untheoretical and wary of general conclusions that do not come from specific experiences. He is a moralist and puritan, one who, for all his populism and working-class sympathies, is squeamish about dirt, disgusted by corporeal and faecal odours. He is caricatural of Jews to the point of anti-Semitism, and routinely homophobic, using ‘the pansy left’ and ‘nancy poets’ as if they were accepted sociological terms. He dislikes foreign food, and thinks the French know nothing about cooking; while the sight of a gazelle in Morocco makes him dream of mint sauce. He lays down stern rules about how to make and drink tea, and in a rare sentimental flight imagines the perfect pub. He is uninterested in creature comforts, clothes, fashion, sport, frivolity of any kind, unless that frivolity – like seaside postcards or boys’ magazines – leads to some broader social rumination. He likes trees and roses, and barely mentions sex. His preferred literary form, the essay, is quintessentially English. He is a one-man, truth-telling awkward squad, and what, the English like to pretend, could be more English than that? Finally, when
he rebranded himself, he took the Christian name of England’s patron saint. There aren’t too many Erics in the lists either of saints or of national treasures. The only St Eric is Swedish, and he wasn’t even a proper, Pope-made saint.