The news that, for the second time in the last few months, a play banned from he stage is to be broadcast by the B.B.C. (which will probably enable it to each a much bigger public than it would if it were acted) brings out once gain the absurdity of the rules governing literary censorship in Britain.
It is only stage plays and films that have to be submitted for censorship before they appear. So far as books go you can print what you like and take the risk of prosecution. Thus, banned plays like Granville Barker’s ‘Waste’(1) and Bernard Shaw’s ‘Mrs. Warren’s Profession’ could immediately appear in book form with no danger of prosecution, and no doubt sell all the better for the scandal that had happened beforehand. It is fair to say that, if they are any good, banned plays usually see the light sooner or later. Even ‘Waste,’ which brought in politics as well as sex, was finally allowed to appear thirty years after it was written, when the topicality which gave it a good deal of its force had vanished.
The trouble with the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship of plays is not that it happens, but that it is barbarous and stupid-being, apparently, done by bureaucrats with no literary training. If there is to be censorship, it is better that it should happen beforehand, so that the author may know where he stands. Books are only very rarely banned in Britain, but the bannings that do happen are usually quite arbitrary. ‘The Well of Loneliness’(2) for example, was suppressed, while other books on the same theme, appearing round about the same time, went unnoticed.
The book that gets dropped on is the one that happens to have been brought to the attention of some illiterate official. Perhaps half the novels now published might suffer this fate if they happened to get into the right hands. Indeed — though the dead are always respectable ‘ I doubt whether Petronius, or Chaucer, or Rabelais, or Shakespeare would remain un-bowdlerised if our magistrates and police were greater readers.
(1) Waste by Harley Granville-Barker (1877-1946) was banned by the Lord Chamberlain in 1907 because the play, a tragedy, included an abortion. It was publicly presented in 1936.
(2) (Marguerite) Radclyffe Hall (1880-1943), novelist and poet. She published several volumes of poetry, 1906-15, and then novels and stories, including Adam’s Breed (1926), The Well of Loneliness (1928), and The Master of the House (1932). Adam’s Breed won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Femina Vie Heureuse Prize, and the Eichelberger Gold Humane Award. The Well of Loneliness was withdrawn in England on 28 August 1928 following the scandal aroused because of its depiction of lesbianism. It was immediately reissued in Paris and it was also published in New York, in 1928, with a commentary by Havelock Ellis. The novel was republished in London (without commentary) in 1949. Miss Hall’s companion, Lady Una Vicenzo Troubridge, wrote The Life and Death of Raddyffe Hall (1961).
TRIBUNE February 28, 1947
(Manchester Evening News for Tribune, 28 February 1947)(1)
One thing one notices in these days when typewriters have become so scarce is the astonishing badness of nearly everyone’s handwriting. A handwriting which is both pleasant to look at and easy to read is now a very rare thing. To bring about an improvement we should probably have to evolve a generally accepted ‘style’ of writing such as we possessed in the past and have now lost.
For several centuries(2) in the Middle Ages the professional scribes wrote an exquisite script, or rather a series of scripts, which no one now living could equal. Then handwriting declined, reviving in the nineteenth century after the invention of the steel pen. The style then favoured was ‘copperplate.’ It was neat and legible, but it was full of unnecessary lines and did not fit in with the modern tendency to get rid of ornament wherever possible. Then it became the fashion to teach children script, usually with disastrous results. To write script with real neatness one practically has to learn to draw, and it is impossible to write it as rapidly as a cursive hand. Many young or youngish people now make use of an uneasy compromise between script and copperplate, and indeed there are many adult and fully literate people whose handwriting has never properly ‘formed.’
It would be interesting to know whether there is any connection between neat handwriting and literary ability. I must say that the modern examples I am able to think of do not seem to prove much. Miss Rebecca West has an exquisite handwriting, and so has Mr. Middleton Murry. Sir Osbert Sitwell, Mr. Stephen Spender, and Mr. Evelyn Waugh all have handwritings which,to put it as politely as possible, are not good. Professor Laski writes a hand which is attractive to look at but difficult to read.
Arnold Bennett wrote a beautiful tiny hand over which he took immense pains. H. G. Wells had an attractive but untidy writing. Carlyle’s writing was so bad that one compositor is said to have left Edinburgh in order to get away from the job of setting it up. Mr. Bernard Shaw writes a small, clear but not very elegant hand. And as for the most famous and respected of living English novelists, his writing is such that when I was at the B.B.C. and had the honour of putting him on the air once a month there was only one secretary in the whole department who could decipher his manuscripts(3).
(1) See headnote to ‘As I Please,’ from Feb. 21, 1947 for publication of Orwell's column in the Manchester Evening News. Another section, numbered here 75A, appeared the preceding day in the Daily Herald. One of the trade papers to which the Manchester Evening News gave hospitality during the crisis was The Shoe and Leather Record. In a report from that journal printed immediately below Orwell's column was a statement that the fuel crisis had caused a loss in production of 10,000,000 shoes, giving added point to Orwell's difficulty in finding footwear.
(2) (centuries) printed as countries.
(3) The reference is to E. M. Forster's handwriting.
TRIBUNE 7 March 1947
SOME time ago a foreign visitor asked me if I could recommend a good, representative anthology of English verse. When I thought it over I found that I could not name a single one that seemed to me satisfactory. Of course there are innumerable period anthologies, but nothing, so far as I know, that attempts to cover the whole of English literature except Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and, more comprehensive and more up-to-date, The Oxford Book of English Verse.
Now, I do not deny that The Oxford Book is useful, that there is a great deal of good stuff in it, and that every schoolchild ought to have a copy, in default of something better. Still, when you look at the last fifty pages, you think twice about recommending such a book to a foreigner who may imagine that it is really representative of English verse. Indeed, the whole of this part of the book is a lamentable illustration of what happens to professors of literature when they have to exercise independent judgement. Up to 1850, or thereabouts, one could not go very wrong in compiling an anthology, because, after all, it is on the whole the best poems that have survived. But as soon as Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch reached his contemporaries, all semblance of taste deserted him.
The Oxford Book stops at 1900, and it is true that the last decades of the nineteenth century were a poor period for verse. Still, there were poets even in the nineties. There was Ernest Dowson—‘Cynara’ is not my idea of a good poem, but I would sooner have it than Henley’s ‘England, My England’—there was Hardy, who published his first poems in 1898, and there was Housman, who published A Shropshire Lad in 1896. There was also Hopkins, who was not in print or barely in print, but whom Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch must have known about. None of these appears in The Oxford Book.
Yeats, who had already published a great deal at that date, does appear shortly, but he is not represented by his best poems: neither is Kipling, who, I think, did write one or two poems (for instance, ‘How far is St Helena’) which deserve to be included in a serious anthology. And on the other hand, just look at the stuff that has been included! Sir Henry Newholt’s Old Cliftonian keeping a stiff upper Up on the North-West Frontier; other patriotic pieces by Henley and Kipling; and page after page of weak, sickly, imitative verse by Andrew Lang, Sir William Watson, A. C. Benson, Alice Meynell and others now forgotten. What is one to think of an anthologist who puts Newbolt and Edmund Gosse in the same volume with Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Blake?
Perhaps I am just being ignorant and there does already exist a comprehensive anthology running all the way from Chaucer to Dylan Thomas and including no tripe. But if not, I think it is time to compile one, or at least to bring The Oxford Book up to date by making a completely new selection of poets from Tennyson onwards.
Looking through what I have written above, I see that I have spoken rather snootily of Dowson’s ‘Cynara’, I know it is a bad poem, but it is bad in a good way, or good in a bad way, and
