LONDON LETTER
299
Paris quickens the mind, New York energizes the character, London
constipates the soul. We are now in full hibernation. Almost nothing is
alive. From where I write I can see through the long twelve-foot win–
dows (what an old-world luxury these are, with their solemn rectangular
panes framing the landscape like a squared drawing) on to the tall
bare trees in the park, yet not quite bare for the twigs of the wych-elm
support a quantity of sparrows who are constantly changing place on
the branches like the notes on a pianola roll. And beyond, the whole
terrace springs suddenly into light. And what light! Here in the years
from 1820 to 1940 curtains would have been drawn, lamps discreetly lit,
fires poked, silver teapots poured by gentle hands, the sacred moment
of nightfall commemorated by a whole glittering society of business men
and retired proconsuls-not of the highest fashion and probably abys–
mally dull-but still enormously solid,
in
fact,
there.
And now in all the
terraces round the park,
in
several hundred houses, the lights go on.
But now there are no curtains. We can see into every room as we go by.
Bare boards as a rule (a carpet is a sign of prestige), three or four
desks (two men and a woman) in each partitioned drawing-room, long
tubular dazzlingly bright lights suspended over each desk, in every room
some painted steel cabinets and a row of six pegs festooned with hats
and mufflers. Occasionally crowding in a canteen, but generally huddling
together in each room are little groups; tea-cups (no pots visible) in
hand; safe, dowdy, and supreme (and in their bill is our peace)–
you've guessed it, reader-GIVIL
SERVANTS.
It was that or pull the whole
place down.
Those of us who still live in the Park are actually in the position
of Mr. Rock in Henry Green's last novel,
Concluding,
which has created
such a stir here. Mr. Rock is a retired scientist of the 1980's occupying
a cottage in a park where the big house is now a State girls' school (a
school for officials) and whose principals, the Misses Baker and Edge,
are determined to evict
him:
we are not yet quite in that situation for
we have already defeated the State who wanted to clip off the lower
branches of our maples, guardians of privacy, and to run a pipe through
our kitchen. Henry Green, the author of
Concluding
is
in
public life
a successful business man; it is natural that his especial brand of lyrical
individualism should lead
him
to oppose the State, but I am also told
that Orwell's new novel,
1984,
has a similar theme and deals with the
struggle of two lovers to avoid the State's eugenics laws, etc. What is in
fact happening under Socialism
is
a new alignment of writers against
the State, including many writers who voted socialist and whose con–
science in matters of social justice is now 'at last appeased, only
to
be
