On George Orwell and Henry Miller

 On George Orwell and Henry Miller

George Orwell’s essay on Henry Miller, “Inside the Whale” is so much a part of the general climate of literary and political opinion that I can’t recall a time when I wasn’t generally familiar with this short book.  Even though I didn’t remember most of its contents, upon re-reading the essay, it was evident to me that I had read it many times before and that it’s arguments were all well-known, established not only by encounters with the text itself, but, also, by citations of Orwell’s prose and by echoes and reflections of the essay in innumerable other critical writings – including, I think, most notably in the work of Christopher Hitchens, William Buckley, and Murray Kempton.  The essay is fundamental in many ways and, therefore, worth summarizing.  In a way, it is part of the canon of Henry Miller’s writing and, now, is fused to his novels, particularly Tropic of Cancer, the ostensible subject of the volume.

Orwell published Inside the Whale in March 1940 when the world was again at war.  The book contained two other essays.  “Inside the Whale” is long enough to count as a book in itself.  The essay is constructed in three parts.  The first involves an appreciation of Tropic of Cancer.  The second, and much the longest part of the writing, places Miller and his novel in the milieu of twentieth century literature between the Georgian period (pre-World War One) to the Second World War.  This survey is justly famous and contains some of Orwell’s most pungent and penetrating observations on British writers and the literary scene, including his important analysis of the Communist Party in western Europe. (Orwell’s equally well-known criticism of Auden’s phrase ‘necessary murder’ in one of the poet’s verses on the Spanish Civil War is also part of this essay.) In one sense, Orwell’s engagement with Miller is merely the occasion for a wide-ranging study of the relationship between politics and creative writing that is the actual raison d’etre for the essay.  The third, and fairly short, part of the essay returns to Miller and makes some interesting predictions as to the fate of literature in a future that Orwell views as increasingly dark and totalitarian.  

Orwell met Miller in Paris in December 1936 when the British writer was on his way to Spain to fight in the Civil War there.  Orwell was wearing a light blue suit of flimsy fabric.  Miller didn’t think the suit was a good uniform for warfare and, as a practical man, he gave Orwell one of his denim and corduroy ensembles that he considered more appropriate for winter combat.  Orwell had lived in Paris in 1928 and 1929, an experience that he recounts in Down and Out in Paris and London, a book that has some resemblance to Miller’s novel.  Apparently, Orwell’s paths didn’t cross with Miller during his previous sojourn in Paris.

In the first section of “Inside the Whale”, Orwell characterizes Tropic of Cancer.  He says Miller told him that the book was pure autobiography, nothing invented or, even, exaggerated.  Orwell says that the reader’s first task when confronting the book is to not be non-plussed by the enormous number of “unprintable” words in the writing.  He recounts that the reader’s reaction is to refuse to be intimidated by the obscenity.  Orwell describes the appeal of the book as being two-fold.  First, the book is written in prose that Orwell regards as plain-spoken, free of cant, direct and conversational.  He argues that the book is episodic and uneven, but contains the best prose written in the thirties.  (He thinks the first hundred pages of Black Spring are even better.)  Orwell is aware of “squashy surrealist” passages and overblown fantastical reveries, but disregards those defects in the novel.  He argues that the book is impressive because it gives an overwhelming impression of reality.  The book captures the exact texture and experience of Paris around 1930's, an argument that induces some poetic flights of prose in Orwell as well.  If you want to know what Paris looked like, how it smelled and felt, in 1930, then, Tropic of Cancer will show this to you.  Orwell further argues that the book captures exactly the sensibility of the drunk and dead-beat expatriates in the French capitol, realistically depicts their conversation and patterns of thought.  Orwell knows this from his own experience in Paris at around the same time and in the same milieu.  He argues that the reader has the sensation that the book is “about him”, that is, accurately and honestly reflects the reader’s own perceptions of the world.  This degree of realism is unprecedented.  No one had hitherto told the exact truth about this aspect of life and this makes the book important and irreplaceable.  Orwell regrets that the book is about brothels and saloons, but says that the rootless life of the expatriate limits the subject matter available to Miller.  Most importantly, Orwell says that the book doesn’t argue for (or against) anything – it makes no criticism of the existing order of things, proposes nothing, and implies no program for the betterment of society or the human species.  The book is fundamentally American.  Orwell tells us that Miller speaks in the language of the ordinary American businessman.  Indeed, he says that it’s not an accident that Miller look exactly the way you would expect an American businessman to look.  He’s practical, down-to-earth, and, most importantly, happy.  Miller isn’t optimistic but he’s happy – he writes the book from a place that is beyond optimism and pessimism.  

The second part of Orwell’s essay surveys literary movements between 1900 and 1940, the date of the essay.  The art critic, John Canaday, wrote a famous history called Mainstreams of Modern Art tracing the lineage of trends in art from David at the time of the French Revolution to the American Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock.  The book is compelling, beautifully written, and, in some ways, definitive.  But, of course, this approach to art history has its critics.  First, Canaday emphasizes French artists and imagine that all important tendencies in the development of modern art have been incubated in Paris.  (This approach neglects the fact that Kandinsky, a Russian, invented non-figurative art in Munich and that Edvard Munch in Oslo is as influential to modern painting as Braque or Renoir – in other words, there are many important outliers to the lineage proposed by Canaday.)  Second, Canaday tends to flatten artistic movements, simplifying what are, in effect, complex concatenations of false starts and dead ends, into a linear narrative.  These same problems arise in connection with Orwell’s ambitious effort to summarize major trends in modern literature in the long central panel in his triptych text on Miller.  Orwell omits important writers who don’t exactly fit his evolutionary model – for instance, he seems to have no interest in Virginia Woolf, an odd failing in that the trajectory of her novels, in fact, matches Orwell’s thesis.  Further, his model for the historical progression of literary fiction has difficulty accounting for long-lived writers who continued to make influential work long after the movement that spawned them (or that they originated) has passed – Thomas Hardy’s late poetry is an example of work that doesn’t fit Orwell’s scheme; similarly, H. G. Wells, a writer whose fiction is rooted in the late 19th century continued to publish best-selling novels into the decade of the thirties.  Some of T. S. Eliot’s most important work, for instance, the Four Quartets (1943) appears two decades after the poetry that made him famous and that Orwell argues to b characteristic of the malaise of the post-War era.  An even more legitimate objection to Orwell’s sketch of the history of 20th century in literature relates to the question of where we should be looking – that is, who’s history is relevant.  Miller, of course, is an American writer.  He published his famous work in Paris, but he is (as Orwell observes) very characteristically American with respect to his disdain for some sorts of fancy rhetoric, his plain-spoken conversational style, and his cheerful temperament.  When Miller says of the party in Le Havre that he was so happy that the “merriment made (him) think of pulling off his clothes and doing a war dance”, he is writing specifically in “the American grain” – an European author would not describe festivity in those terms.  Critics of a Leftist bent have spilled oceans of ink over Orwell’s sketch of literary history – these criticism, for me, at least, are more or less invalid as instances of special pleading.  The entire thrust of the second part of Orwell’s essay, and the reason it exists in the first place, is to deride Marxist approaches to literature (and to politics as well).  Of course, this touches a nerve and many Left-leaning writers have aggressively attacked Orwell’s summary of the“mainstreams” in modern literature. 

Orwell argues that the representative writer of the pre-war period was the poet A. E. Housman.  Housman’s poetry asserts the “beauty of nature” but darkens his idyllic portraits of country life (A Shropshire Boy) with gothic accounts of jealousy, murder, suicide, and early death.  Housman portrays provincial farm life in pastoral terms but insists on imposing an elegiac tone on his subject – life and young love are beautiful but tragic.  World War One explodes the nature poetry favored by Georgian writers such as Housman.  The characteristic writers of the post-War period are Joyce, Eliot, and T. H. Lawrence – Orwell mentions Celine’s Journey to the End of Night in this company.  Orwell is forced to admit that this group of writers is diverse and, in many ways, antithetical to one another – for instance, Joyce and Lawrence detested one another.  Orwell observes that the post-War generation doesn’t believe in progress or, even, the idea of progress – post-war writers, Orwell argues, not only reject progress but  go so far to maintain that progress ought not even to occur.  Orwell is a witty writer and he notes that Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes’ poems achieve the “difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it really is.”  Eliot is religious and some of this is “Christian pessimism” Orwell says.  But, over all, the Great War induced radical skepticism as to all existing institutions – the great theme of post-War writing is that the Victorian belief in progress led to poison gas and the machine gun. Therefore, anything that suggests human progress is not merely fraudulent but pernicious.

Orwell reserves most of his vitriol for the writers of the thirties.  (There is an aspect of sibling rivalry to his arguments about the Marxist literature of that decade.)  The overwhelming pessimism and skepticism that characterized the post-war generation can’t be sustained.  A belief in human agency and the progress revives from the ashes in the form of Marxist-Socialist writing.  Orwell regards the representative writers of the decade of the thirties as W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender.  (He notes that doctrinaire Marxism is inimical to novels and that the chief artifacts of the Marxist-Socialist school are poems, particularly those about the Spanish Civil War, citing Auden, Spender, and Louis MacNiece.)  Orwell’s own flirtation with Marxism and his disastrous participation in the Spanish Civil War convinced him that Communism and its surrogates were not merely naive and fraudulent but, also, potentially deadly.  He argues forcefully that Marxist-influenced political engagement in literature is based on a naive refusal to come to terms with Stalinist totalitarianism.  In this respect, Orwell writes:  “The Communist movement in Western Europe began as a movement for the violent overthrow of capitalism but degenerated within a few years into an instrument of Russian foreign policy.”  This means that Marxist-Communist writers have to contort themselves into painful and inconsistent positions in order to maintain fealty with Stalin’s shifting alliances and economic policies.  Literature can’t be based on a lie, Orwell asserts, and, therefore, history will not be kind to the ideological art produced in the thirties.  Even more frightening, Orwell says is the tendency of Leftist writing to devolve into mere anti-Fascism, the stultifying “mental atmosphere of the last war” – “all the familiar wartime idiocies, spy-hunting, orthodoxy-sniffing (Sniff, sniff.  Are you a good anti-Fascist?), the retailing of atrocity stories, came back into vogue as though the intervening years had never happened.”  Writers of thirties were “expected lock themselves into a little constipating cage of lies; at its best a voluntary censorship was at work in everyone’s minds.”   Good novels, Orwell maintains, are not written “by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by persons who are conscience-stricken as to their own unorthodoxy.”  And, it’s into this constricted, ideologically narrow and dogmatic literary milieu that Henry Miller bursts as a breath (or gale-force wind) of fresh air.

By contrast with the mainstreams of modern literature, Henry Miller is resolutely apolitical.  Miller’s figures are not “political animals” but “individualist and completely passive” – they espouse “the viewpoint of a man who believes the world process to be outside his control and who in any case hardly wishes to control it.  Miller told Orwell when he met him Paris in 1936 that “our civilization is destined to be completely swept away and replaced by something so different that we should scarcely regard it as human – a prospect that did not bother him, he said.”  The cataclysm is coming but it doesn’t matter.  Miller’s politics are wholly negative.  His only political declaration, Orwell observes, was a statement of “extreme pacifism”, an “individual refusal to fight with no apparent wish to convert others to the same opinion – practically, in effect, a declaration of irresponsibility.” (This was Miller’s response to a questionnaire in Marxist Quarterly.)  In this setting, the concept of “irresponsibility” mirrors my application of the term Gelassenheit to Miller’s writing – Gelassenheit is a term used in late Heidegger to signify a complete receptiveness to the world that makes no effort to change the terms of existence; it is the equivalent of Christian resignation, the willingness to “let things be as they are” and to not interfere with other people or with society either in whole or in part.  

Orwell cites a book by Miller called Max and the Phagocytes, apparently a collection of essays.  In that book, Miller writes at length about the diaries of Anais Nin, writing that was unknown to Orwell in 1940 and that had not been published at that time.  Miller claims Nin’s diaries comprise the “only true feminine writing that has appeared” – a claim that bemuses Orwell.  Orwell says that Nin is “evidently a completely subjective, introverted writer.”  Miller alludes to a famous essay by Aldous Huxley on painting by El Greco.  In that essay, also one of my favorites (I read the essay in High School), Huxley remarks that El Greco’s figures all seem to be confined in the belly of a whale “without enough space to swing a cat” and that there is something “peculiarly horrible about being confined to a ‘visceral prison’.”  (El Greco’s taffy-pulled, ecstatic figures also seem partially absorbed by the whale’s gastric juices, wallowing in weird cells formed from puffy tissue.)  Miller refutes Huxley’s statement that it is “horrible” to be trapped in the belly of a whale.  He says that the whale’s belly is a womb, a safe, protected space insulated from the trauma and insults of the surrounding world.  Anais Nin, in her writing, is a “voluntary Jonah”, that is, someone who has chosen a position that cannot be touched by the outside world, a place of maximum irresponsibility.  People confined in the belly of a whale don’t vote, can’t fight against enemies and, indeed, don’t have enemies.  Short of “being dead”, Orwell says, being in the whale’s belly is the “final unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility.”  Whatever may be true of Anais Nin, a subject on which Orwell is agnostic, Miller, he says, writes from the perspective of Jonah, “a willing Jonah”: “he has performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting.”  

Orwell identifies Miller as a post-human writer.  His novel is apposite to the dilemma in which we find ourselves, Orwell argues.  Orwell acknowledges that while he was writing this essay “another European war has broken out.”  This war, Orwell says “will last several years and tear Western civilization to pieces” or, if conclusive, will simply prepare the world for the next war “which will do the job once and for all.”  We are moving, Orwell argues, into the age of totalitarian dictatorships, “the autonomous individual will be stamped out” and there will remain no vestige of “freedom of thought”.  This means that “literature will suffer a temporary death.”  “Progress or reaction” are both swindles.  “Get inside the whale or rather admit that you are inside the whale (for you are)” and incapable of affecting the world.  Orwell says Miller is the novelist for a post-human world which is purely negative and in which no progress can be made – there is no room for “constructive criticism”.  Miller’s readers are sitting beside him on an iceberg that is rapidly melting. Miller, Orwell concludes, is “a completely negative, unconstructive, amoral writer, a mere Jonah, a passive acceptor of evil, a sort of Whitman among the corpses.”  Tropic of Cancer is not even a book – “it is a demonstration of the impossibility of any major literature until the world has shaken itself into a new shape.”

Orwell survived World War Two and lived until 1950 when he died at 46 from complications of tuberculosis.  The world didn’t end conveniently with the Second World War.  I don’t know if Orwell reevaluated his opinions about Henry Miller after the War.