merely the subjective truth. And along those lines, apparently, it is
still possible for a good novel to be written. Not necessarily an
edifying novel, but a novel worth reading and likely to be remembered
after it is read.
While I have been writing this essay another European war has broken out.
It will either last several years and tear Western civilization to
pieces, or it will end inconclusively and prepare the way for yet another
war which will do the job once and for all. But war is only 'peace
intensified'. What is quite obviously happening, war or no war, is the
break-up of LAISSEZ-FAIRE capitalism and of the liberal-Christian
culture. Until recently the full implications of this were not foreseen,
because it was generally imagined that socialism could preserve and even
enlarge the atmosphere of liberalism. It is now beginning to be realized
how false this idea was. Almost certainly we are moving into an age of
totalitarian dictatorships--an age in which freedom of thought will be
at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The
autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence. But this
means that literature, in the form in which we know it, must suffer at
least a temporary death. The literature of liberalism is coming to an end
and the literature of totalitarianism has not yet appeared and is barely
imaginable. As for the writer, he is sitting on a melting iceberg; he is
merely an anachronism, a hangover from the bourgeois age, as surely
doomed as the hippopotamus. Miller seems to me a man out of the common
because he saw and proclaimed this fact a long while before most of his
contemporaries--at a time, indeed, when many of them were actually
burbling about a renaissance of literature. Wyndham Lewis had said years
earlier that the major history of the English language was finished, but
he was basing this on different and rather trivial reasons. But from now
onwards the all-important fact for the creative writers going to be that
this is not a writer's world. That does not mean that he cannot help to
bring the new society into being, but he can take no part in the process
AS A WRITER. For AS A WRITER he is a liberal, and what is happening is
the destruction of liberalism. It seems likely, therefore, that in the
remaining years of free speech any novel worth reading will follow more
or less along the lines that Miller has followed--I do not mean in
technique or subject matter, but in implied outlook. The passive attitude
will come back, and it will be more consciously passive than before.
Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly
there is nothing left but quietism--robbing reality of its terrors by
simply submitting to it. Get inside the whale--or rather, admit you are
inside the whale (for you ARE, of course). Give yourself over to the
world-process, stop fighting against it or pretending that you control
it; simply accept it, endure it, record it. That seems to be the formula,
that any sensitive novelist is now likely to adopt. A novel on more
positive, 'constructive' lines, and not emotionally spurious, is at
present very difficult to imagine.
But do I mean by this that Miller is a 'great author', a new hope for
English prose? Nothing of the kind. Miller himself would be the last to
claim or want any such thing. No doubt he will go on writing--anybody
who has ones started always goes on writing--and associated with him
there are a number of writers of approximately the same tendency,
Lawrence Durrell, Michael Fraenkel and others, almost amounting to a
'school'. But he himself seems to me essentially a man of one book.
Sooner or later I should expect him to descend into unintelligibility, or
into charlatanism: there are signs of both in his later work. His last
book, TROPIC OF CAPRICORN, I have not even read. This was not because I
did not want to read it, but because the police and Customs authorities
have so far managed to prevent me from getting hold of it. But it would
surprise me if it came anywhere near TROPIC OF CANCER or the opening
chapters of BLACK SPRING. Like certain other autobiographical novelists,
he had it in him to do just one thing perfectly, and he did it.
Considering what the fiction of the nineteen-thirties has been like, that
is something.
Miller's books are published by the Obelisk Press in Paris. What will
happen to the Obelisk Press, now that war has broken out and Jack
Kathane, the publisher, is dead, I do not know, but at any rate the books
are still procurable. I earnestly counsel anyone who has not done so to
read at least TROPIC OF CANCER. With a little ingenuity, or by paying a
little over the published price, you can get hold of it, and even if
parts of it disgust you, it will stick in your memory. It is also an
'important' book, in a sense different from the sense in which that word
is generally used. As a rule novels are spoken of as 'important' when
they are either a 'terrible indictment' of something or other or when
they introduce some technical innovation. Neither of these applies to
TROPIC OF CANCER. Its importance is merely symptomatic. Here in my
opinion is the only imaginative prose-writer of the slightest value who
has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past. Even
if that is objected to as an overstatement, it will probably be admitted
that Miller is a writer out of the ordinary, worth more than a single
glance; and after all, he is a completely negative, unconstructive,
amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of
Whitman among the corpses. Symptomatically, that is more significant than
the mere fact that five thousand novels are published in England every
year and four thousand nine hundred of them are tripe. It is a
demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the
world has shaken itself into its new shape.
THE ART OF DONALD MCGILL (1941)
Who does not know the 'comics' of the cheap stationers' windows, the
penny or twopenny coloured post cards with their endless succession of
fat women in tight bathing-dresses and their crude drawing and unbearable
colours, chiefly hedge-sparrow's-egg tint and Post Office red?
This question ought to be rhetorical, but it is curious fact that many
people seem to be unaware of the existence of these things, or else to
have a vague notion that they are something to be found only at the
seaside, like nigger minstrels or peppermint rock. Actually they are on
sale everywhere--they can be bought at nearly any Woolworth's, for
example--and they are evidently produced in enormous numbers, new series
constantly appearing. They are not to be confused with the various other
types of comic illustrated post card, such as the sentimental ones
dealing with puppies and kittens or the Wendyish, sub-pornographic ones
which exploit the love affairs of children. They are a genre of their
own, specializing in very 'low' humour, the mother-in-law, baby's-nappy,
policemen's-boot type of joke, and distinguishable from all the other
&n
bsp; kinds by having no artistic pretensions. Some half-dozen publishing
houses issue them, though the people who draw them seem not to be
numerous at any one time.
I have associated them especially with the name of Donald McGill because
he is not only the most prolific and by far the best of contemporary post
card artists, but also the most representative, the most perfect in the
tradition. Who Donald McGill is, I do not know. He is apparently a trade
name, for at least one series of post cards is issued simply as 'The
Donald McGill Comics', but he is also unquestionable a real person with a
style of drawing which is recognizable at a glance. Anyone who examines
his post cards in bulk will notice that many of them are not despicable
even as drawings, but it would be mere dilettantism to pretend that they
have any direct aesthetic value. A comic post card is simply an
illustration to a joke, invariably a 'low' joke, and it stands or falls
by its ability to raise a laugh. Beyond that it has only 'ideological'
interest. McGill is a clever draughtsman with a real caricaturist's touch
in the drawing of faces, but the special value of his post cards is that
they are so completely typical. They represent, as it were, the norm of
the comic post card. Without being in the least imitative, they are
exactly what comic post cards have been any time these last forty years,
and from them the meaning and purpose of the whole genre can be inferred.
Get hold of a dozen of these things, preferably McGill's--if you pick
out from a pile the ones that seem to you funniest, you will probably
find that most of them are McGill's--and spread them out on a table.
What do you see?
Your first impression is of overpowering vulgarity. This is quite apart
from the ever-present obscenity, and apart also from the hideousness of
the colours. They have an utter low-ness of mental atmosphere which comes
out not only in the nature of the jokes but, even more, in the grotesque,
staring, blatant quality of the drawings. The designs, like those of a
child, are full of heavy lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in
them, every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces
grinning and vacuous, the women monstrously parodied, with bottoms like
Hottentots. Your second impression, however, is of indefinable
familiarity. What do these things remind you of? What are they so like?
In the first place, of course, they remind you of the barely different
post cards which you probably gazed at in your childhood. But more than
this, what you are really looking at is something as traditional as Greek
tragedy, a sort of sub-world of smacked bottoms and scrawny
mothers-in-law which is a part of Western European consciousness. Not
that the jokes, taken one by one, are necessarily stale. Not being
debarred from smuttiness, comic post cards repeat themselves less often
than the joke columns in reputable magazines, but their basic
subject-matter, the KIND of joke they are aiming at, never varies. A few
are genuinely witty, in a Max Millerish style. Examples:
'I like seeing experienced girls home.'
'But I'm not experienced!'
'You're not home yet!'
'I've been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you get yours?'
'I left off struggling.'
JUDGE: 'You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with
this woman?'
Co--respondent: 'Not a wink, my lord!'
In general, however, they are not witty, but humorous, and it must be
said for McGill's post cards, in particular, that the drawing is often a
good deal funnier than the joke beneath it. Obviously the outstanding
characteristic of comic cards is their obscenity, and I must discuss that
more fully later. But I give here a rough analysis of their habitual
subject-matter, with such explanatory remarks as seem to be needed:
SEX.--More than half, perhaps three-quarters, of the jokes are sex
jokes, ranging from the harmless to the all but unprintable. First
favourite is probably the illegitimate baby. Typical captions: 'Could you
exchange this lucky charm for a baby's feeding-bottle?' 'She didn't ask
me to the christening, so I'm not going to the wedding.' Also newlyweds,
old maids, nude statues and women in bathing-dresses. All of these are
IPSO FACTO funny, mere mention of them being enough to raise a laugh. The
cuckoldry joke is seldom exploited, and there are no references to
homosexuality.
Conventions of the sex joke:
(i) Marriage only benefits women. Every man is plotting seduction and
every woman is plotting marriage. No woman ever remained unmarried
voluntarily.
(ii) Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-preserved
and good-looking people beyond their first youth are never represented.
The amorous honeymooning couple reappear as the grim-visaged wife and
shapeless, moustachioed, red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being
allowed for.
HOME LIFE--Next to sex, the henpecked husband is the favourite joke.
Typical caption: 'Did they get an X-ray of your wife's jaw at the
hospital?'--'No, they got a moving picture instead.'
Conventions:
(i) There is no such thing as a happy marriage.
(ii) No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument.
Drunkenness--Both drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto funny.
Conventions:
(i) All drunken men have optical illusions.
(ii) Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men. Drunken youths
or women are never represented.
W.C. JOKES--There is not a large number of these. Chamber pots are ipso
facto funny, and so are public lavatories. A typical post card captioned
'A Friend in Need', shows a man's hat blown off his head and disappearing
down the steps of a ladies' lavatory.
INTER-WORKING-CLASS SNOBBERY--Much in these post cards suggests that
they are aimed at the better-off working class and poorer middle class.
There are many jokes turning on malapropisms, illiteracy, dropped aitches
and the rough manners of slum dwellers. Countless post cards show
draggled hags of the stage-charwoman type exchanging 'unladylike' abuse.
Typical repartee: 'I wish you were a statue and I was a pigeon!' A
certain number produced since the war treat evacuation from the
anti-evacuee angle. There are the usual jokes about tramps, beggars and
criminals, and the comic maidservant appears fairly frequently. Also the
comic navvy, bargee, etc.; but there are no anti-Trade-Union jokes.
Broadly speaking, everyone with much over or much under ?5 a week is
regarded as laughable. The 'swell' is almost as automatically a figure of
fun as the slum-dweller.
STOCK FIGURES--Foreigners seldom or never appear. The chief locality
joke is the Scotsman, who is almost inexhaustible. The lawyer is always a
swindler, the clergyman always a nervous idiot who says the wrong thing.
The 'knut' or 'masher' still appears, almost as in Edwardian days, in
out-of-date looking evening-clothes and an opera hat, or even spats and a
knobby cane. Another sur
vival is the Suffragette, one of the big jokes of
the pre-1914 period and too valuable to be relinquished. She has
reappeared, unchanged in physical appearance, as the Feminist lecturer or
Temperance fanatic. A feature of the last few years is the complete
absence of anti-Jew post cards. The 'Jew joke', always somewhat more
ill-natured than the 'Scotch joke', disappeared abruptly soon after the
rise of Hitler.
POLITICS--Any contemporary event, cult or activity which has comic
possibilities (for example, 'free love', feminism, A.R.P., nudism)
rapidly finds its way into the picture post cards, but their general
atmosphere is extremely old-fashioned. The implied political outlook is a
Radicalism appropriate to about the year 1900. At normal times they are
not only not patriotic, but go in for a mild guying of patriotism, with
jokes about 'God save the King', the Union Jack, etc. The European
situation only began to reflect itself in them at some time in 1939, and
first did so through the comic aspects of A.R.P. Even at this date few
post cards mention the war except in A.R.P. jokes (fat woman stuck in the
mouth of Anderson shelter: wardens neglecting their duty while young
woman undresses at window she has forgotten to black out, etc., etc.) A
few express anti-Hitler sentiments of a not very vindictive kind. One,
not McGill's, shows Hitler with the usual hypertrophied backside, bending
down to pick a flower. Caption; 'What would you do, chums?' This is about
as high a flight of patriotism as any post card is likely to attain.
Unlike the twopenny weekly papers, comic post cards are not the product
of any great monopoly company, and evidently they are not regarded as
having any importance in forming public opinion. There is no sign in them
of any attempt to induce an outlook acceptable to the ruling class.
Here one comes back to the outstanding, all-important feature of comic
post cards--their obscenity. It is by this that everyone remembers them,
and it is also central to their purpose, though not in a way that is
immediately obvious.
A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic post cards is the woman with
the stuck-out behind. In perhaps half of them, or more than half, even
when the point of the joke has nothing to do with sex, the same female
figure appears, a plump 'voluptuous' figure with the dress clinging to it
as tightly as another skin and with breasts or buttocks grossly
over-emphasized according to which way it is turned. There can be no
doubt that these pictures lift the lid off a very widespread repression,
natural enough in a country whose women when young tend to be slim to the
point of skimpiness. But at the same time the McGill post card--and this
applies to all other post cards in this genre--is not intended as
pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography. The Hottentot
figures of the women are caricatures of the Englishman's secret ideal,
not portraits of it. When one examines McGill's post cards more closely,
one notices that his brand of humour only has a meaning in relation to a
fairly strict moral code. Whereas in papers like ESQUIRE, for instance,
or LA VIE PARISIENNE, the imaginary background of the jokes is always
promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the
McGill post card is marriage. The four leading jokes are nakedness,
illegitimate babies, old maids and newly married couples, none of which
would seem funny in a really dissolute or even 'sophisticated' society.
The post cards dealing with honeymoon couples always have the
enthusiastic indecency of those village weddings where it is still
considered screamingly funny to sew bells to the bridal bed. In one, for
example, a young bridegroom is shown getting out of bed the morning after
his wedding night. 'The first morning in our own little home, darling!'