418
PARTISAN REVIEW
Duke of Bedford and the-perfectly harmless-Ross Williamson. The
trouble is that some of your American readers may not realise Mr. Orwell's
status in this country and take his commentary seriously. We all like him
here, though the standard of his pamphleteering is going down of late, and
we know him as the preacher of a doctrine of Physical Courage as an Asset
to the left wing intellectual, and so forth. I think we all agree that he
is
pretty thoroughly out of touch with any writing under thirty years of age,
and his last two public performances-a reproof in sorrow to my book
"No Such Liberty," and this "London Letter" of his--suggest that he still
has not grasped why most of the post·Thirties poets are pacifists, or what
their pacifism would entail if Hitler arrived here.
Mr. Orwell calls us "objectively pro-fascist." I suppose he means that
we are letting anti-fascism go by default:
If
we suggest to him that we,
who have the single intention of salvaging English artistic culture when
the crash comes, are the only people likely to continue to hold genuinely
anti-fascist values, he will not be convinced. But perhaps he will grant
that Hitler's greatest and irretrievable victory over here was when he
persuaded the English people that the only way to lick Fascism was to
imitate it. He puts us in a dilemma which cannot be practically rebutted,
only broken away from-"1£ I win, you have political fascism victorious:
if you want to beat me, you must assimilate as much of its philosophy as
you can, so that I am bound to win either way." Accordingly we began
feverishly jamming into our national life all the minor pieces of Fascist
practise which did not include socialist methods, sitting on the Press "he·
cause this is Total War," making our soldiers jab blood bladders while
loudspeakers howl propaganda at them, because the German army con·
sisted of efficient yahoos. The only people who said that to defeat Fascism '
one must (a) try to understand it and (b) refuse to accept its tenets one–
self were the pacifists. It looks as
if
Mr. Orwell and his warlike friends
were being not objectively but constructively supporters of the entire
philosophical
~pparatus
which they quite genuinely detest.
What, again, does Mr. Orwell imagine the role of the artist should be
in occupied territory? He should protest with ali his force, where and
when he can, against such evils as he sees--but can he do this more use–
fully by temporarily accepting the status quo, or by skirmishing
in
Epping Forest with a pocket full of hand grenades? I think that English
writers honour, and will follow when the opportunity comes, the example
of integrity which Gide has set. We are going to be entrusted with the job
of saving what remains of the structure of civilized values from Hitler or
alternatively from Churchill and his bladder-prickers. The men who, like
Orwell, could have helped, are calling us Fascists and presumably dancing
round the ruins of Munster Cathedral. We prefer not to join them, and if,
in the pursuit of our task we find ourselves obliged to publish in the same
paper as the Devil himself, the others having politely refused us as unor·
thodox, we shall have very few qualms.
May 18, 1942
BRENTWOOD, ENGLAND
