Saints and Sinners

I try never to miss Paul Johnson’s weekly column in the English Spectator. The man, now elderly (as he himself sometimes points out) remains a fantastic fountain of words, as he has been for half a century. He was a loud and leading left-wing journalist and then an equally leading and loud right-wing journalist. He has written a shelf-full of substantial histories; now in “retirement” he has become a painter of more than amateur standing, and writes his column for the Spectator, which is called “And Another Thing”.

He discusses almost any subject at all, lively with detail from his amazing memory and learning. The pugnacity of youth has by no means evaporated, and he can still draw down on his head the wrath of younger writers, including the equally outspoken Christopher Hitchens. When Johnson grew a fine red beard, Hitchens, in a journal article, wrote that his face resembled an explosion in a pubic hair factory.

Johnson, it seems, feels no urge to be unnecessarily agreeable. The late Bob Santamaria told me that he found him “the rudest man he ever met”. As Santamaria knew Australia’s own Bert Evatt, the compliment to Johnson was no small one.

I was led thus to ponder on Johnson by his use in a recent column of a single word to describe the general character of George Orwell: “saintly”. It pulled me up sharp—it simply wouldn’t do. It puzzled me that Johnson, with an enormous vocabulary under his sensitive command, would have chosen an epithet so inept for this towering writer of the twentieth century.

I recognise the existence of saints, secular or divine, on their lofty pinnacles of virtue. (I suspect that I might, over the years, have met one or two people close to being qualified for their golden crowns.) But from Saint Peter onwards, saints seem to have had also a “down side”: self-centred, bossy-boots, prima donnas, querulous, eccentrics, obsessive, demanding. For ordinary humans, a saint would be a pain in the bum to have to live with. And that doesn’t at all fit my picture of George Orwell, who rubbed along matter-of-factly with his neighbours, literary and political disputation notwithstanding.

If someone were to put a pistol to my head and command me to produce a single-word description of George Orwell, I should hesitate between “decent” and “lucid”, and plead to be allowed to use both.

The occasional writings of George Orwell—his essays, journalism and letters—have been collected in four superb volumes whose editors justly claim that they present a “completely original story of the political life of the first half of the twentieth century”. Lucky to own such a treasured set, I sat down to dip into them here and there—a smut-hound snuffling for evidence which might convict Orwell of “saintliness”. I found none.

Paul Johnson is not the man to attack while you yourself remain half-armed, so I ceased “browsing” and set myself to read the whole 2000 Orwell pages from start to finish. It took a month—four weeks of feasting afresh upon a revelation of my own times. It had been a serious episode of reading, like taking in at one stretch all Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time novels. And indeed both works are, though so utterly different, English anatomies of the same slice of history. Orwell remained just as I recalled him—decent, clear, forthright, tolerant, original and honest. There were two qualities of which I detected no traces whatever: baloney and “saintliness”. This corpus of occasional writings is a greater memorial to him than his novels, even including Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

George Orwell died in 1950, but I was struck by the number of topics he discussed which continue to vex us today. One of them is society’s general notions about obscenity, and in particular about pornography. Orwell covered this in a long and lucid (though not wholly satisfactory) essay in 1944; this he called “Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali”. Though in Australia we have from time to time a hoo-ha about alleged pornography, I have never seen a sign that anyone has ever read Orwell’s “Benefit of Clergy”. But it would have done Prime Minister Rudd no harm at all to have cast an eye over it before he plunged with such personal warmth into the recent row about Bill Henson’s photograph of a nude young girl.

It would take much to persuade me that the great surrealist Dali (1904–89) was even half sane. (All the choice morsels following come from Dali’s own book, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, a large and copiously self-illustrated volume published in 1943). At age five, he flung a little boy off a suspension bridge; at age six he gave his three-year-old sister a terrible kick in the head, which gave him “a delirious joy”; at seven, he wanted to be Napoleon.

Preparing to get into bed with his wife for the first time, he coated his body with an ointment of “goat’s dung boiled up in fish glue”. His pictures are given thoughtful titles: “The Great Masturbator”; “Sodomy of a Skull with a Grand Piano”; “Mannequin Rotting in a Taxi-cab”. In this last-named, over the girl’s bloated face and breast, crawl large snails, drawn with exquisite perfection. Dali notes particularly that these are Burgundy snails, the edible sort.

Perhaps this tells us all (perhaps even more than all) we want to know about Salvador Dali. But what does it tell us about the society—mostly the wealthy and intellectual end of it—which made Dali famous and rich, paying millions for his wet dreams spread out over canvas?

Under a dictatorship, pornography cannot (at least in theory) lose itself in legal thickets: if Big Brother says your art is objectionable, it is objectionable; and while you go to jail, your painting goes to the bonfire. Simple!

For those of us who prefer a liberal and democratic society, such a procedure is repellent. But we must in consequence accept that our tolerance poses a paradox of near-impossibility on our creative artists and our courts: if there is no standard and objective way of defining “obscene”, how can reasonable prosecutions be launched against artists or authors, or against any objects or writings they have made? In his opening paragraph, the author of an Australian legal textbook offers us a little joke: a solemn Geneva conference on the suppression of pornography found at the outset that they were unable to define obscenity, “after which, having triumphantly asserted that they did not know what they were talking about, settled down to their discussion”.

No wonder that parts of some court proceedings read like scripts for the Marx Brothers. Take the famous Angry Penguins case in Adelaide, where all the law’s gravity was directed against the editor, Max Harris. His alleged offence was to have published the verses of Ern Malley, a poet who did not exist. I quote from memory:

Magistrate: “Why are the genitals dragged in by the heels?”
Detective Vogelsang (prosecuting): “I do not know the meaning of the predatory birds upon the park gates, but the words sound obscene.”

Max Harris was fined five pounds. Detective Vogelsang received an official commendation for zeal.

Felix Frankfurter, famous US Supreme Court justice, claimed to have found a clear path through the common law’s problems with obscenity. When one of his brothers on the bench complained of perplexity, Frankfurter, with characteristic confidence, declared that he had no problems: the existence of an offence, and also a measure of its gravity were proved by the strength of his erection while considering the material under prosecution. And he added that he believed his views were becoming more liberal. The hopeful new Frankfurter doctrine did not long survive the response of his colleague: “You’re not growing more liberal, Felix; you’re just getting older.”

Even a broadminded democracy limits the extent to which scoundrels and sick minds can exploit filth and fantasy, but the decision on what “current community standards” will tolerate should never fall wholly on a magistrate or judge; it should always pass before a jury; it is a question better settled by twelve random, average minds than by one judicial officer, however wise or learned.

Meanwhile, when any controversy starts to run hot, remember the goldmine of wisdom that always waits in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (splendidly indexed, too).