Radicals on the Road

The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s

Bernard Schweizer

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780813920696
• eBook ISBN: 9780813921969
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the 1930s, the discourse of travel furthered widely divergent and conflicting ideologies—socialist, conservative, male chauvinist, and feminist—and the major travel writers of the time revealed as much in their texts. Evelyn Waugh was a declared conservative and fascist sympathizer; George Orwell was a dedicated socialist; Graham Greene wavered between his bourgeois instincts and his liberal left-wing sympathies; and Rebecca West maintained strong feminist and liberationist convictions.

Bernard Schweizer explores both the intentional political rhetoric and the more oblique, almost unconscious subtexts of Waugh, Orwell, Greene, and West in his groundbreaking study of travel writing's political dimension. Radicals on the Road demonstrates how historically and culturally conditioned forms of anxiety were compounded by the psychological dynamics of the uncanny, and how, in order to dispel such anxieties and to demarcate their ideological terrains, 1930s travelers resorted to dualistic discourses.

Yet any seemingly fixed dualism, particularly the opposition between the political left and the right, the dichotomy between home and abroad, or the rift between utopia and dystopia, was undermined by the rise of totalitarianism and by an increasing sense of global crisis—which was soon followed by political disillusionment. Therefore, argues Schweizer, traveling during the 1930s was more than just a means to engage the burning political questions of the day: traveling, and in turn travel writing, also registered the travelers' growing sense of futility and powerlessness in an especially turbulent world.

PART ONE

1 GEORGE ORWELL

FOR GEORGE ORWELL, both the act and the rhetorical figure of traveling were linked with the idea of social and political transformation. Because of his intense awareness of social differences, it was enough for him to migrate from one social class to the next to feel the kind of estrangement typically experienced by travelers to distant places. Orwell needed to go no further than to London's East End or to the industrial north of England to feel a strong sense of border crossing or, as Valentine Cunningham put it, of “going over:” “No wonder ‘going over’ was contemplated by Orwell and his kind as a sort of exile, a self-alienation from most of what was familiar to one's own region and class” (241). But for Orwell, traveling involved not only a social and ideological, rather than a geographical, displacement, it was also tied up with a sense of responsibility, of promoting a silenced perspective, and of making sociopolitical confessions.

As a committed socialist and self-declared member of the “lower upper middle class,” Orwell traveled whenever he left the confines of his bourgeois social turf. Thus, for Orwell, travel was never a matter of self-gratification or escape. On the contrary, he used it to get to the bottom of things, even if that bottom turned out to be pretty nasty. In his essay “Why I Write,” Orwell argues that “the opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude” (422). If one substituted traveling for art, the statement would reflect another of Orwell's deeply held convictions. Indeed, Orwell considered both art and travel as expressions of one's politics. In the course of his career as a traveler and travel writer, it became increasingly clear that travel and social criticism, even revolution, sprang from the same source. To be more specific: travel for Orwell was a means to transcend the boundaries of his “native” bourgeois ideology, and thereby to promote a revolutionary consciousness in the members of his own class.

In order to appreciate the uniqueness of Orwell's readiness to “lower” his social status by traveling, one has to recognize that the opposite is usually achieved when Westerners pack their bags. In his Mexican travelogue, for instance, Aldous Huxley argues that “it is never wise to establish a reputation for what must seem to [rural Mexicans] inordinate and fantastic wealth…. Our host was doubtless one of the richest men in the village; but his whole annual income would probably not have bought a single first-class ticket across the Atlantic” (243). Paul Fussell argues that mass tourism is a form of (temporary and reversible) upward mobility in a global context: “The escape is also from the traveler's domestic identity, and among strangers a new sense of selfhood can be tried on, like a costume. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss notes that a traveler takes a journey not just in space and time, but ‘in social hierarchy as well’: and he has noticed repeatedly that upon arriving in a new place he has suddenly become rich (travelers to Mexico, China, or India will know the feeling) (13). In this analysis, the degree of personal mobility is correlated with the degree of personal privilege. The greater the privilege, the further the range of one's journey. In light of this tendency, George Orwell goes against the grain, first by limiting his mobility and choosing destinations that are closer to home, and second by willingly leaving behind his middle-class milieu to experience life in underprivileged contexts. Of course, he does not do so gratuitously; in fact, nothing less than a change of his own identity is what he pursues.

This revolutionary tendency manifests itself in Orwell's travel writing in a sustained effort to construct a political persona for himself that is of one piece with the ethos of liberation and egalitarianism that he promotes. In order to do so, Orwell presents his early involvement with imperialism as a learning process rather than a form of complicity with empire, and he portrays his later sufferings in the lower-class contexts of Paris, London, Wigan, and Catalonia as a heroic act of self-sacrifice in the interest of social justice and personal redemption. In his own words, traveling served him to pay penance for his earlier political “sins” and for his social background as a member of the bourgeoisie. In this sense, then, Orwell's journeys were indeed—to invoke Paul Fussell's insight—a form of “travail.”¹ Rather than being exercises in sadism, however, Orwell's self-imposed sufferings were meant to be cathartic. He intended to purify himself of unsavory ideological inclinations by undergoing purgatorial experiences, and to expose, by proxy, the readers of his travel books to a similar experience of ideological reorientation.

Orwell's social and political convictions were greatly affected by his involvement in the British imperial service. Already his father had been an official in the British Empire (he served in the infamous Opium Department of India, that branch of the imperial administration that sought to undermine China's social stability by soliciting its population into opium addiction). In fact, Orwell (ne Eric Blair) was born in India in 1903. He moved to England with his mother one year later and thereafter saw his father only at rare intervals. Due to his father's regular income, though, both mother and son were able to maintain a comfortable middle-class existence in Oxfordshire. Orwell grew up to be a bright boy and his intellectual abilities earned him a scholarship to the well-regarded Saint Cyprian's preparatory school. Another scholarship paved the way to Eton College. It was at Eton that Orwell's consciousness of class was intensified, since he was one of the few students not from a fully upper-class background.

The painful memories of being a social misfit are invoked in Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), his third novel, where the protagonist Gordon Comstock, Orwell's alter ego, argues that “probably the greatest cruelty one can inflict on a child is to send it to school among children richer than himself. A child conscious of poverty will suffer snobbish agonies such as a grown-up person can scarcely even imagine” (53). The idea that upward mobility can be obtained through elitist education is seriously questioned in Aspidistra, as Gordon turns into a poet manqué in spite of his family's sacrifices to secure him an education.

In his own life, a botched academic career rather than social determinism were the causes of Orwell's modest professional aspirations after college. Bernard Crick argues that “the idea of serving in India or Burma would have come up quite naturally and from the family, especially with his maternal grandmother still in Mandalay…. Uncertain where he belonged, it was as if he wanted to go back to where he was born, even before his memory” (73). So, quite “naturally,” Orwell joined the Imperial Police in Burma, where he served as headquarters assistant from 1922 to 1927. But while he fulfilled the practical side of this job with distinction, he was plagued by ever increasing moral and ideological doubts about his complicity with the system he served. Orwell came to realize more and more clearly that his work as a servant of the British Empire was incompatible with his moral outlook. Orwell's first novel, Burmese Days (1934), and several of his best short stories and essays (among them “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging”) are attempts to deal with this troubling experience. While on home leave in 1927, Orwell decided to quit the imperial service. But in choosing to comply with the dictate of his conscience, he also chose temporary poverty. Indeed, the decision left him penniless, and he refused to ask his family for financial assistance.

Instead of relying on others, he decided to fend for himself, renting a cheap room in London. It was in the same year that his fascination with tramp life began. Orwell would regularly exchange his clothes for beggar's rags and mingle with unemployed laborers, sailors, and tramps in London's harbor district. The reasons for Orwell's “slumming” can be found in his curiosity about and strong sympathy for the social underdog. Moreover, a profound desire to rebel against the patriarchal order of his own class prevailed. He would comment later that “failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to ‘succeed’ in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying” (Wigan Pier, 180).

Part of this attitude originated in the harsh and unloving environment of his five-year preparatory school. One of Orwell's biographers maintains that “St. Cyprian's had prejudiced him against success early in life because it had given him such a corrupt view of merit” (Shelden, 117). Once again, Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying acts as Orwell's alter ego: “There are two ways to life, he decided. You can be rich, or you can deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it” (57). Faced with this choice, Comstock decides to opt out of capitalist means of self-advancement: “Already, at sixteen, [Comstock] knew which side he was on. He was against the money-god and all his swinish priesthood. He had declared war on money.” (57). But Orwell's pristine anticapitalism was based on subjective impressions and, perhaps, on a certain amount of self-loathing, rather than on abstract political theories. This is particularly evident in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), which Orwell wrote on the rebound from his experience as an imperial officer.

• • •

Down and Out in Paris and London, Orwell's first published book, was a travel book. In it Orwell chronicles his experiences at the very bottom of the social scale in Paris and in London. Lacking an occupation more attractive than writing, he had moved to the French capital in 1928 as a means to get into that profession. Paris was then the hub of aspiring and established writers in the Western world, and it was logical for a young author to try his luck there.

Most events described in Down and Out are autobiographical, but there is some fictional elaboration and a good deal of rearrangement to give the semblance of a continuous narrative. Orwell lumps together in the second half of the book events that happened to him in London both before and after he went to Paris. The transition between the Paris and the London sections of the book is particularly fictitious, as the I-narrator of Down and Out escapes from menial kitchen work in Paris only to find himself pitched into a tramp's life in London. In reality, Orwell spent the Christmas of 1929 in the comfort of his parental home in Southwold. In sum, the story of Down and Out is a travel experience in two senses: first, the Paris section describes a foreigner's experience in the French capital; and second, the people Orwell mixed with, both in Paris and in London, were so far removed from the world of his middle-class context that his prolonged exposure to their way of life can aptly be identified as a form of social exploration. In the words of Averil Gardner, Orwell was “a courageous and truthful explorer of areas of human experience known at first hand to few of his contemporaries” (19).

The opening sections of Down and Out demonstrate that Orwell's concern with poverty was at that point intuitive rather than politically programmatic. The picturesque and imaginatively estranged nature of his descriptions overrides any particular social concern. For instance, Orwell's living quarters in Paris are described as consisting of “a very narrow street—a ravine of tall leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse” (6). This description, with its sensationalist appeal, savors rather than laments the reality of social degradation. Its defamiliarization rests on the invocation of the ravine, a familiar topos of romantic poetry, which is now subverted to suit the almost surrealistic perspective of the “lurching” walls of decaying houses. Furthermore, Orwell's use of the journey motif in combination with the social descent suggests parallels with the picaresque tradition.

In keeping with this narrative convention, Orwell introduces a narrator whose adventures in unknown and socially degraded contexts serve both as social documentary and as entertaining story material. Accordingly, the two “protagonists” (Orwell himself and an exiled Russian named Boris) have distinctive Cervantian overtones. Orwell fills the role of the “tricky servant,” comparable to Sancho Panza, as he steals victuals, jumps the rent, and does other mischief, while Boris, in the tradition of another stock character (i.e., the braggart soldier or alazon), is given to virtually boundless idealism: “After eating, Boris became more optimistic than I had ever known him. ‘What did I tell you?’ he said. ‘The fortune of war! This morning with five sous, and now look at us, I have always said it, there is nothing easier to get than money’” (58). While such contrasts between realism and idealism add color to the story, they tend to detract from the political and economic causation of social inequity.

Orwell's quixotic temperament in Down and Out signals a low degree of ideological self-awareness. Indeed, when asked by Boris,” ‘Have you any political opinions?’” the character based on Orwell answers with a simple, “‘No’” (61). It is important to see the implications of this denial. In the absence of a clear ideological commitment, Orwell merely fictionalizes his own immersion in the working-class context of Paris. This makes the Paris section of Down and Out an entertaining, fantastical, unreliable, and not very enlightening analysis of a foreign cultural and social environment. The impulse to tell a good story practically annuls the subversive, socially corrective potential of the eyewitness's factual observations and analytical reflections. As a rhetorical achievement the text is superb; as an episodic story, the book has its bright moments (even though it is rather loosely plotted). But as a testimony to foreign living and working conditions, the text offers no more than pointers and subjectively filtered impressions.

• • •

From a decidedly unpolitical and only vaguely conceptualized working-class experience in Paris, Orwell goes on to describe life as a temporary member of London's tramp community. Interestingly, Orwell is more adversely affected by the conditions he finds at home than by the situation in Paris. In the London part, everything that is ugly and disgusting about poverty moves in much closer around Orwell. Indeed, in Paris the burrow-like structure of his Hotel X is vaguely fascinating and Madame F.'s seedy lodging house appears “homelike” (7). Moreover, in Paris it was the outside of houses that looked “leprous”; in London, metaphorical leprosy is found inside the dwellings: “The walls were leprous, and the sheets, three weeks from the wash, were almost raw umber” (178). Orwell's graphic descriptions of urban poverty, shocking in themselves, gain additional poignancy when compared with Jack London's grim account of the East End some thirty years earlier. In fact, Orwell's scandalized remark, “I was going to wash, when I noticed that every basin was streaked with grime—solid, sticky filth as black as boot-blacking” (178) is directly reminiscent of passages in Jack London's The People of the Abyss (1903): “two by two, we entered the bathroom. There were two ordinary tubs, and this I know: the two men preceding had washed in that water, we washed in the same water, and it was not changed for the two men that followed us. This I know, but I am also certain that the twenty-two of us washed in the same water” (71). Obviously, the dehumanizing, unsanitary conditions at London's “spikes” and “doss-houses” (shelters and boardinghouses for the poor and unemployed) had remained exactly the same since Jack London's social explorations, a fact that lends further urgency to Orwell's calls for reform.

But even while Orwell literally followed in Jack London's footsteps, he also adopted his predecessor's basic method—a stark naturalism inspired by social compassion. As a consequence, the picaresque appeal that had dominated the first half of Down and Out begins to fade, with Orwell paying more attention to the specific sociopolitical causation of poverty: “A tramp tramps, not because he likes it, but for the same reason as a car keeps to the left; because there happens to be a law compelling him to do so. A destitute man, if he is not supported by the parish, can only get relief at the casual wards, and as each casual ward will only admit him for one night, he is automatically kept moving” (272).

Besides giving sound reasons for the phenomenon of tramping, Orwell also makes concerted efforts to better the moral image of tramps: “The English are a conscience-ridden race, with a strong sense of the sinfulness of poverty. One cannot imagine the average Englishman deliberately turning parasite, and this national character does not necessarily change because a man is thrown out of work. Indeed, if one remembers that a tramp is only an Englishman out of work, forced by law to live as a vagabond, then the tramp-monster vanishes” (273). Such sympathetic reflections are complemented by ideas for reforming the ways in which tramps are treated. Even though Orwell does not present a coherent proposal for the abolition of trampdom, he does come up with a suggestion that might better their plight. Of course, his idea to turn tramps into indentured farmers producing their own food has a rather strong air of the impractical about it. Nevertheless, Orwell's argument that tramps deserve to be treated respectfully gives his narrative a socially revisionist appeal. The political significance of Down and Out is thus enhanced in the same measure as its infatuation with narrative diminishes to make room for a more pragmatic, documentary approach to travel writing as a form of social critique.

• • •

After the favorable reception of Down and Out and the moderate success of Orwell's first two novels (Burmese Days and A Clergyman's Daughter), his publisher Victor Gollancz, one of the coeditors of the Left Book Club, commissioned Orwell early in 1936 to investigate the conditions of working-class life in England's industrial North. What is more, he paid Orwell the considerable sum of £500 as an advance on the project. The goal was to produce a “Condition of England” book that could be used as an instrument for political change. Indeed, earlier examples of this genre, such as Henry Mayhew's nineteenth-century investigation into the living conditions in London's cholera districts, had triggered a vast response, including parliamentary calls for sanitary reforms. Gollancz was confident that Orwell's research among coal miners and unemployed laborers would result in a treatise as influential as Mayhew's series of articles published in the Morning Chronicle between September 1849 and December 1850 (later issued as a book under the title London Labour and the London Poor). After all, just like Mayhew, Orwell could evoke vivid and detailed accounts of lower-class living conditions, thereby engaging middle-class sympathies for the victims of capitalism. However, while Mayhew had written exclusively about London's poorest metropolitan districts, Orwell went beyond London to report on rural and industrial poverty in England's mining districts, thereby outlining a vaster and less manageable socioeconomic predicament.

There was another precursor to Orwell's book about the workingand living conditions of the nation's poor—J. B. Priestley's English Journey (1934). By comparison with the book that Orwell produced, English Journey retains more of the travelogue. Indeed, along with his investigations into unemployment and socioeconomic hardship, Priestley included detailed descriptions of cathedrals, museums, and of the countryside. Orwell, on the other hand, carefully pruned his writing, cutting out the trappings of conventional travel books such as the pastoral, art criticism, and culinary samplings, in order to emphasize the social relevance of his journey. The few references to the natural environment that are included are merely extensions of the particular social milieu he investigated: “For quite a long time, perhaps another twenty minutes, the train was rolling through open country before the villa-civilisation began to close in upon us again, and then the outer-slums, and then the slag-heaps, belching chimneys, blast-furnaces, canals and gasometers of another industrial town” (20).

Tellingly, Orwell never zooms in on the “villa civilisation,” which may cause one to wonder whether his exclusive focus on poverty and destitution is a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
• Part Two
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index