I perceive we have destroyed those independent beings who were able to cope with tyranny single-handed:… the poor man retains the prejudices of his forefathers without their faith, and their ignorance without their virtues; he has adopted the doctrine of self-interest as the rule of his actions…
de Tocqueville
A. Scepticism to Cynicism
I use the word ‘cynicism’ as a rough label for a group of attitudes more positive than those described in the two preceding chapters. These ‘cynical’ attitudes are not chiefly an accepting; they have something of active self-protection about them. I have referred to them incidentally more than once, but they require fuller attention, especially because they are frequently attacked by certain kinds of speaker – presidents of religious assemblies, headmasters on speech-days – in terms which seem often to suggest a failure to understand much of their nature. We are all familiar with reports of meetings at which the ‘couldn’t care less attitude of the modern generation’ has been deplored. Is this attitude really typical of working-class people today? If so, in what forms and why?
I think there is a sense in which this spirit can be said to affect many working-class people, though it is not peculiar to them. It probably flourishes in the same climate as breeds indulgence. To recapitulate the relevant connecting-points from a previous chapter: democratic egalitarianism can encourage a suspicion of all authority and responsibility; the notion of unmodified progress can encourage a band-wagon mentality. But the band-wagon seems sometimes to be heading only towards more complex dangers. One remains on the wagon but in a divided mood. There is still progress, but one believes and yet does not believe in it. There is still freedom, but a sense of unlimited freedom for its own sake can have a way of going bad on people. ‘Anything goes’ may sound gay, but can be a verbal posture inspired by fear. Indifferentism is likely to follow, with its own kind of tyranny. If all are of equal value, nothing is of much worth. There is in the end an emptiness and a purposelessness indicated by such phrases as ‘what’s the use?’, and ‘who cares?’; nothing seems to ‘add up’.
Yet behind the modern forms of this apparent cynicism one may also see something of that earlier nonconformity, of scepticism towards public and ‘boss-class’ assertions of good intent. On this healthier side the currently popular ‘I’m not buying that’ is linked to the traditional spirit of ‘I do not conform’ (though this exact phrase was never typical of the working-classes). The contemporary cynical mockery connects with the older debunking and comic art. The refusal to accept any publicly offered values is related to the old pragmatic and unidealistic root. The refusal to admit any exceptionableness is a distortion of the older refusal to bow down before pomposity and officialdom. Thus Pip and Joe, at the beginning of Great Expectations – to choose one example from hundreds – automatically hope that King George’s men will not catch the prisoners escaped from the hulks.
In its newer uses, ‘I’m not buying that’ can often be a flat refusal ever to ‘buy’ anything. The earlier ‘I do not conform’ was often a positive assertion that official standards would not be accepted, because they ran counter to other standards, held by individuals and believed to be higher. The new attitude is frequently a refusal to consider any values, because all values are suspect. ‘I dissent’ becomes ‘It’s all boloney’, a mockery of all principles and a willingness to destroy them. Cheerful debunking becomes an acid refusal to believe in anything. Anti-authoritarianism becomes not merely a nonconformity nourished by a sense of the value of personal and individual life, but a refusal to accept at all the idea of authority: ‘I’m not going to be used like a dog’ becomes ‘I’m not going to be bossed around by anyone’; and there, as elsewhere, the tone is as important as the words.
I am not suggesting, therefore, that such attitudes are new. Indeed, many of the phrases used here are centuries old. Even ‘I’m aboard, Jack, pull up the ladder’ has been in use in a variety of forms for at least half a century; and ‘wide’, used in much the same way as in ‘wide boy’ today, dates from 1887.
I am suggesting that the use of such attitudes appears to have been extended latterly, as a saving armour against a world which is in much suspected, in spite of its obvious improvements; an armour behind which most of the wearers are puzzled before they are self-indulgent. Where domestic or personal roots are weak or have been forcibly broken, these attitudes can quickly lead to an extensive moral ‘spivvery’.
It seems to me that these attitudes are at present still employed mainly for contact with the world outside, with those who are not ‘Us’. We are back with the double view, once again strengthened. The failure to ‘connect’ increases; at a time when so much is expected of each man as a citizen, the springs with which he might irrigate that part of life are infected at the source. ‘The mass man’, says Ortega y Gasset, ‘is simply without morality.’ Yet that is only generally true of the ‘mass man’ as a mass man, as the ‘common man’; it is untrue of him as an individual, living a life which has some recognizable meaning to him. And he continues to wish for connexions between the two kinds of life. Thus, spontaneous and strong applause greets the member of a B.B.C. team who contributes to a discussion on ‘our present difficulties’ (after the political and economic members have spoken) his conviction that what we really need is ‘a change of heart’. He has touched the submerged wish for rules of conduct which are ‘straightforward’, which are associated with the thought of religion and which apply to public as firmly as to private life.
But very frequently, as we all know, one meets the assumption that in public ‘anything goes’ (sometimes reinforced by something of a desire to ‘get yer own back’); the assumption which makes people ready to cheat in outside matters where in local matters they are normally honest; the tradition of ‘seeing y’ pals alright’, which usually means cheating those outside, for whom you work, so as to show loyalty towards the group you know personally. You will not fiddle from your mate, but you will flog anything you safely can from the ‘firm’ or the Services. You will not twist a neighbour, but a middle-class customer is fair game. I remember a young working-class wife being offered by the British Legion the cost of a house-removal. The man who carried out the move for her with a horse and cart suggested that they should double the charge, claim on the Legion, and split the difference. This was done, and for all I know the man may have regularly employed the trick. I should guess that most of his customers could have been as easily persuaded, and were otherwise as honest, as the one I knew. The public, the ‘outside’, eye was being used; ‘the Legion’ was as anonymous as the old Board of Guardians, and you naturally got what you could from them. It would have seemed ‘soft’ not to do so and, by refusing, you might have embarrassed the flesh-and-blood man who stood before you and seemed so helpful. It would seem a bit silly to strike attitudes about such things; everyone does them every day; and other promptings could be muffled by the use of such phrases as ‘a quiet fiddle’ or ‘a gentle fiddle’.
At any period this, too, will be among the attitudes of working-class people. After all, they feel, this kind of thing is done to them, who have so little to sell or exchange, most of the time. But it appears to be strengthened now by a suspicion that there is no principle to be trusted outside, that one would be a fool to think there were.
Further, the apparent cynicism is in part a saving inhibition, a defence against constant assault. In the age of the public-address systems, the ‘common man’ (especially during the long wars, but increasingly now in peace also) is for ever hearing the multitudinous tones of exhortation and invocation: the ‘this won’t hurt a bit’ encourager, the plummily explanatory tone of the master-official; all the voices which constantly over-coax, over-sell, over-‘kid’: ‘Do you suffer from —?’, ‘Why you should eat —’; ‘Conqueror or Conquered… which are you?’, ‘Have you got —?’, ‘You’ll be amazed’, ‘You too can have —’, ‘There’s a — for you’, ‘Did you know that —?’, ‘What would you have done?’ If the ‘common man’ did not find a defence against all this, he would be as harassed as a solitary bell-boy in a Grand Hotel. He is not much deceived; he has some awareness of his own difficulties in judging and coping; he has a much more sensitive awareness of the fact that he is being ‘got at’, being ‘worked on’. He has suspected ‘fancy talk’ for generations. He can ‘see through’ most appeals, and is on constant watch against being ‘taken in’.
Today he is so bespattered by the ceaseless exoteric voices, is invited so frequently to feel this, this, and this, to react to this, to do that, to believe this – that in recoil he often decides to feel none of these things, neither the glories nor the horrors. He goes dead to it all. He develops a strong patina of resistance, a thick and solid skin for not taking notice. When the voices, especially those of the Press, really have something important to speak to him about, he gives them the old smile and continues to read the funny bits. They have cried ‘wolf ’ too often. The B.B.C. News Service is trusted, with the qualifying suspicion that it is the voice of officialdom in the last resort, and the qualifying conviction that it is dull anyway. To the papers, the response is a mild and easy cynicism:
‘Oh, y’ read all kinds of things in the papers.’
‘It’s all lies in the papers.’
‘The papers are full of lies.’
‘It’s all propaganda in the papers.’
When I was a boy the older generation of working-class people used often to say, as evidence of the truth of some fact, ‘Oh, but it was in the papers.’ That phrase seems to me now almost entirely unused. One goes on reading the papers, even the political parts, so long as they are made human and personal. At the back of the mind, in matters inviting any form of genuine belief, there sounds an echo from a bottomless unbelief. It is interesting to read details of the lives of film-stars, and particularly of their private lives; but if one is expected really to believe that So-and-so is happily married, well, one smiles again – and goes on reading. I listened to several groups of working-class people talking about Captain Carlsen and the Flying Enterprise, at the time when every organ of publicity was making the most of it. They were one and all utterly unaffected by the massed shouts that here was individual heroism of a high order. They did not express reasonable doubts about the nature of the act; they simply, and as it were automatically, assumed that it was phoney, that commerce was at the back of it somewhere, and that the papers were involved in the trick. There was no heat; just the usual killing assumption. Working-class people tend to take the pleasures offered from outside, whilst inwardly having little respect for the environment providing those pleasures; they readily take amusement from that environment, but ‘aren’t such chumps’ as to believe in it. In view of the situation described in the two preceding chapters, this is not only an understandable but, in origin, a healthy reaction.
In the world of work, in the bosses’ world, it is generally assumed that cash rules, that everyone is out for gain. The working-classes are at ground-level in the economic jungle; they may not see the higher deceptions or the higher sacrifices, but they see the individualism of a cash-democracy at work in a thousand small ways. If they are intermediaries between the boss and the customers, they are often expected to learn the relevant ways of fiddling in their trade. ‘Fiddling’, twisting, seem the normal characteristics of the process of ‘getting on’ as they see it practised. One sad sight is a hired craftsman with a boss who acts only as executive and indulges in the usual amount of twisting. The craftsman may carry out his part of the contract honestly, but in conversation – to show that he knows the world he is in – he makes a brave show as a cynic and ‘fiddler’ in small things. He sees a gulf between publicly professed morality and the reality. If he is moving towards middle-age he remembers the thirties and the way men were often discharged, so long only as the bosses’ ship could be kept afloat. He feels fairly sure that in the end the cash-nexus wins – ‘money talks’. The defining phrases roll out:
‘It’s all a money-making racket.’
‘It’s all money – money – money’
‘Everybody’s out for number one.’
‘It’s a money-making concern.’
‘Everyone’s out for himself in the long run.’
‘Everybody’s on the make.’
‘It all comes back to money / economics in the end.’
‘They’re all on the fiddle.’
‘Y’ never get owt for nowt.’
‘There’s a catch in it somewhere.’
Amid all this, ‘Honesty is the best policy’ comes to seem as out of date as the poker-work in which it was traced over the brass-bedstead. Unless you are a fool you ‘scrimshank’ where you can:
‘It’s a living, i’nt it?’
‘Y’ may as well fiddle. They’ll all fiddle yer anyway.’
‘Why should I worry?’
‘Never mind [if something goes wrong], I ain’t paid to think.’
‘They’ll see y’ carry the can alright.’
Hearing these phrases day after day from a group of workmen we might easily conclude that their cynicism was complete. But such speech is in part formal or symbolic; it indicates that they know a hawk from a handsaw, that they have no illusions about the true nature of industry.
So it is with their attitudes towards the more public or official areas of life. Of the cheerful cynicism towards the clergy – ‘nice work if y’ can get it’; ‘wonderful what y’ can get paid for nowadays’ – I wrote in an earlier chapter. Much the same is true, though here it has a sharper edge, of attitudes towards politics and politicians. It is generally assumed that politicians are:
‘All twisters/crooks.’
‘Only out for their own ends.’
‘Feathering their own nests.’
‘Looking after number one.’
‘All talk.’
‘’E’s a real politician alright,’ they say, meaning that he is ‘all talk and no do’, and that ‘such as ’im never really do owt for people like us’. Again, many of these are very old cries, and natural to working-people; but they are used very frequently today, and used now with the flat assurance that it is the same all over, and in all parts of life.
In times of war it has never been easy to persuade the body of working-people to feel enmity towards the other side; ‘They’ seem too obviously at the back of it. It would be foolish to expect the ‘ordinary man’ to respond like Rupert Brooke, when he is drafted into the Services. He goes in because he has to, because ‘They’ll always get yer in the end’; ‘They’ hold all the aces. Today the almost universal assumption, whether in time of war or of peacetime National Service, is that the whole thing is suspect, that ‘I’ am only in it because ‘I’ was not as quick as the other guy to think of a ‘fiddle’. Here more than ever can be seen the complicated interweaving of reasonable and dignified attitudes with the wider newer forms. The whole business is so involved, so anonymous, that people say, ‘Ah’m just living through it till I get home – and after that, “Damn you, Jack”; shut the door and leave the Missus, the kids and me alone’; or, ‘Ah’m fighting, not for me country, but for me family’; or, ‘Why am I in it? – oh, Ah was daft enough to let them catch me’; or, ‘Me? – Ah’m just a mug. Ah let them get me’; or, ‘Ah can’t do anything. Ah’d be a mug to try – only bring trouble on meself.’ ‘We’re all in it together,’ meaning that we are all caught. The Services are held together not mainly by discipline nor by esprit de corps, nor by the enlightenment which Current Affairs talks bring, but by the interlocking multitude of little cells of personal relationships which men create for themselves inside the huge impersonal structure. These personal relationships, more than anything else, can make decently bearable the boredom I described in the preceding chapter.
Eventually, nothing in this big world can move the ‘common man’ as a ‘common man’. He is infinitely cagey; he puts up so powerful a silent resistance that it can threaten to become a spiritual death, a creeping paralysis of the moral will. We hear much of the gullibility of working-class people, and have seen that there is plenty of evidence for its existence. But this disillusionment presents as great a danger now, and one which (this cannot be said too often) they share with other classes. Outside the personal life they will believe almost nothing consciously; the springs of assent have nearly dried up. Or worse, they will believe in the reducing and destroying things but not in assertions of positive worth: if you assume that most things are a ‘sell’, it is easy to accept every bad charge, hard to accede to a call for praise and admiration. Some of the more powerful influences in modern society are tending to produce a generation expert at destroying by explaining-away, insulated from thinking that there is ever likely to be a cause for genuine enthusiasm or a freely good act, automatically suspicious of anything not in itself disillusioned or patently self-seeking; the catch-phrase is the brittle and negative, ‘so what?’
The situation is made worse by the fact that the reading of very many people, after they have left school, presents them with a picture of a world in which, though their own moral rules in local or parochial affairs are usually assumed, there is little conception of more general actions or principles. What a narrow, what a selective view of modern life, and of the lights by which men live, is presented by many popular papers. For all their readers know, the world of thought or artistic expression, of individual self-sacrifice, of disciplined submission to a purpose, might hardly exist. How many have heard of Albert Schweitzer, except on the rare occasions when some item concerning him has had a brief ‘news value’? It is easier to undervalue much in human experience when one’s reading is so selectively produced.
As a reinforcement there is, behind, the disinclination to strike attitudes, to take oneself too seriously, the slowness to moral indignation, and in addition, the ‘Leave me alone. Ah’m as good as you’ cry of the disappointed decent man. The situation is worse outside than in local communities, but even outside is saved from having its fullest effect by the ability of people often to act, when it ‘comes to it’, in accordance with an old tag or aphorism. In the end, there are some things one just does not do, though one would not be prepared to justify them in argument. This seems a poor substitute for a positive sense of things one does not, or of things one does, or should do. At its fullest it appears in the form of a statement from the dock by a man accused of murder three or four years ago: ‘Oh no, I’m not particularly moral – but I’m not a murderer.’ There are some things one does not do, like committing murder: but the first clause in that statement, ‘I’m not particularly moral,’ is not so much an admission of faultiness, as an assertion that one belongs with the great big illusionless majority; one is not odd. Unextended, as it is for most people at present, this network of attitudes allows them to go on, very puzzled, but for most of the time with some sense that in important matters and when the need arises they ‘know the difference between right and wrong’.
All these attitudes can feed upon themselves, and so spread a nerve-killing effect over other areas. They can become another kind of self-indulgence, a contracting-out. There is then a loss of moral tension, a sort of release in accepting a world with little larger meaning, and living in accordance with its lack of internal demands. ‘All right,’ says one of Thurber’s husbands, with some satisfaction in knowing at last where he stands, ‘so you’re disenchanted – so I’m disenchanted – so we’re all disenchanted.’ Everything is tainted, including me; everyone is out for what he can get; so one can dismiss all the big words. If you try to ‘live by principle’ you are foolish; ‘y’ can’t be Christian today or y’ll be crushed down’: the phrase ‘high ideals’ is commonly used derisively. Ideals may be a sign of lack of self-seeking, but they are unworkable; they do not square with hard facts. If anyone else seems to be trying to ‘live by principle’ he may be a fool or a prig; look for the clay feet. If he is clearly not a fool and does not sound like a prig, but if he will insist that some things are more worth while than others, then he is probably a hypocrite – simply because there can be no justification for such attitudes. They must be a form of ‘line-shooting’ which we have not ‘cottoned on to’ yet. All this will make it harder for the unusual person who is in something – his rules of conduct, the books he reads, the music he likes – unusual, to be left quietly alone as one who is ‘alright but a bit odd’. The ‘Orlick’ spirit and the ‘Sweeney’ spirit (‘That’s all the facts when you come to brass tacks’) can co-operate with contemporary disillusionment and doubt to produce a great emptiness, a hole which is guarded as jealously as though it were a towering principle. This could become the common situation if change were to continue in the way just described. At present the more usual attitude is a not-unattractive, because a limited, and often amusedly borne, ‘disenchantment’.
B. Some Allegorical Figures
Can I now bring into sharper focus this picture of unexceptional but on the whole decent men much beset and equipped with an un inspiring and disconcerting cover of clichés and attitudes? Is it possible to do this by calling up a person who in this at least is typical of many, is of his time? The type of conscript soldier discussed above will not serve, for his condition is often partly temporary; nor will a rootless minor technician, trained by a technical institute to serve a technocratic age; some of his attitudes are in part the product of a special form of not-belonging to any traditional social order. I choose rather a small craftsman or skilled worker, a plumber or a house-painter, or a man who comes to maintain one of the household machines; one of those who exasperate middle-class housewives by their disinclination to be particularly interested in the job they have come to do, a man who gets on with his work but shows no enthusiasm – and probably leaves a mess when he goes.
Perhaps, in all this, such a man is making a response to his situation of more maturity than is always realized. He knows his job and can do it without much strain; it requires no special skill other than that long established by practice. After a time he can hardly be interested in what he does; the same dozen or so jobs recur too often for that. He moves each day from house to house, according to a list passed to him in the morning by the girl in the shop. He would grin if you spoke to him of ‘service to the community’: ‘ay, but it dun’t add up to much’ he would be likely to say. He is engaged by a small firm on a fixed wage, which varies only a little in accordance with a bonus system. The business is run, perhaps, by two men, who employ him, two other craftsmen and a girl who looks after the shop. He knows they ‘fiddle’ a bit; he knows they get more out of the business than he does, and with little risk: he knows they worry a lot and seem no happier than he is. For himself, he would not want a life so worried, even for the sake of the extra money; nor would he like the responsibility. He wants to earn enough to be able to buy the extra things he really enjoys. He could earn more, as some of his mates do, by working himself ‘to death’ on private and untaxed work at nights and week-ends. But ‘What do they get out of it?’ he asks, ‘there’s no fun in a life like that.’ He is without ambition, but also without a keen eye for small gain; he bears his specially energetic mates no real ill-will. He does not respond to calls aimed at the ‘getter-on’, and suspects most other calls.
There are, of course, indolent and scrimshanking men, who do a bad job out of a near-vicious laziness, who take a revenge in that and in leaving as much mess as possible. But he is neither lazy nor stupid by nature. In some ways he is intelligent; had he been born into the middle-classes he would, with his natural ability, have made an at least adequate self-employed shopkeeper or professional man. He is not sour, and still has some craftsman’s pride in turning out what he calls ‘a reasonable job’. The adjective is a modifier, to indicate a job which is not a little masterpiece of his craft (he does that on repairs at home or as a hobby), but a job which is not botched. He does not scrimshank because ‘y’ may as well do a reasonable job while yer about it’.
He sees no need and would not wish to kowtow to the customers, though some of his fellows do that, and get cups of tea and tips on the side. He does not rush, but works at what he calls a ‘steady’ pace; and the adjective is again a modifier. He will not deliberately ‘go slow’, but why, he thinks, should he ‘work his guts out’ for a woman with more conveniences than his own wife, or for the bosses’ profit?
In the eyes of the lady of the house – as she rushes around cleaning, with a dozen things under way at once, and all of them her responsibility, her property, her interest – he is bound to appear to be working at half-speed; but no one moves as quickly as a house-proud wife. She is tempted to call him shiftless and unco-operative, if not surly. He on his side may well regard her with a slightly ironic eye. He has to come to terms, to highly qualified terms, with the possibilities of his working-life. He does not ask a great deal, and he gives fair if unenthusiastic service. He has much of the nonconformity and independence of his grandfather, with the modifications which the twentieth century encourages. At home he is not greatly different from his grandfather in many important matters. William Morris described, in 1879, a similar situation much more eloquently than I can. My point is that, though the conditions of working-people have much improved since Morris wrote, there are important features in contemporary society which encourage working-people to retain these attitudes almost undiminished:
It is quite true, and very sad to say, that if anyone nowadays wants a piece of ordinary work done by gardener, carpenter, mason, dyer, weaver, smith, what you will, he will be a lucky rarity if he gets it well done. He will, on the contrary, meet on every side with evasion of plain duties, and disregard of other men’s rights; yet I cannot see how the ‘British Working Man’ is to be made to bear the whole burden of this blame, or indeed the chief part of it. I doubt if it be possible for a whole mass of men to do work to which they are driven, and in which there is no hope, and no pleasure, without trying to shirk it – at any rate, shirked it has always been under such circumstances. On the other hand, I know that there are some men so right-minded, that they will, despite irksomeness and hopelessness, drive right through their work. Such men are the salt of the earth.
The apparent cynicism of a man such as the one I have described is much less than that of a second typical figure, the spiv or near-spiv, as he can be met in all classes. But in some ways their attitudes are similarly informed. The spiv is a more positive figure, a sort of inverted ‘go-getter’, a ‘casher-in’ on disorder. For those who occur among working-class people, the favourite phrases are:
‘I’m in the know.’
‘I’m knowing/wideawake/wide/a wide boy.’
‘I wasn’t born yesterday.’
‘I’m no Joe.’
‘No flies on Charlie.’
‘I’m a wise guy.’
‘I’m clever/a clever sod/no fool.’
‘I know how to look after number one.’
‘You don’t catch me on that.’
‘It’s a mug’s game.’
‘Not me.’
‘Since when…?’
It may be that this attitude is stronger among those under thirty than among older people, since most older people have memories of the thirties and the war, of sacrifice and co-operation and neighbourliness: the later forties and the fifties have not given such scope for the rediscovery of these virtues.
Naturally, other classes have their own forms, for I am doing no more than touch on a matter which affects all levels of society, in a complexity of ways. One of the more sophisticated middle-class variants of ‘I’m a wise guy’ is ‘I’m a realist, old chap!’ Then there is a middle-class equivalent of the ‘cheerful card’, the man who is in on all rackets, ‘everybody’s pal’ if it comes to a ‘fiddle’, the ‘good fellow’ who is ‘on the inside’: and so on right up to the owners of ‘the accosting profile’ in Auden’s poem, ‘Watch any Day’ – the enormously assured, with the little, nervous give-away gestures. They all share features of a culture, from the man who makes what he can by selling shoddy lino at working-class doors through a host of congenital canvassers and ‘promoters’ up to the really big speculators.
There is the highly-finished and painful social dance-routine of some people who live, at whatever level, on publicly selling their personalities. At night, off duty, they tend to frequent predominantly male bars, and present an appearance compounded of the metallically-cynical and the little-boy-lost. A lower middle-class example comes to mind. In clothing such a man often leans to a sporting, mixed with a gentleman-about-town, effect, a suggestion of a gallant Artillery captain in mufti, or of a character from a short story by Somerset Maugham. He tries to engage the barmaid in sophisticated conversation, offers her a gin-and-It, or port-and-lemon, and tries to forget the hunt for commission-sales by day. In general appearance he aims to be brisk and well-shaved, with a neat moustache in a dark thin pencil line: in manner he is all ‘how to win friends and influence people’, at least during the day. His ready smile does not quite reach the eyes. In bar-room company he carries on conversation in spurts of part-sentences, punctuated by hearty echoing laughs, sprayed round the company to draw them all in. There is a certain amount of slapping of his own thighs and others’ shoulders, for emphasis. A great deal is done with nods, winks, innuendoes, the technical jargon of the bar and minor commercial world. When the mask slips, one realizes why he dislikes a stillness, either in his environment or in himself; underneath the eyes plead, and the braced lips are unhappy.
The doggy communion of the bars is often the nearest which people such as this are able to approach to a sense of a group. It can help to reassure barrow-boys, door-to-door salesmen, and the more prosperous ones with a fine brilliantine bloom on their ears, a faint smell of perfume, and an air suggesting complicated dealings in fancy-goods. Looked at casually, in all their young-men-on-the-spree apparent splendour, they may seem the direct descendants of the Edwardian mashers; they are, but times have changed; the ground has become hollow under their feet. A bar-room provides relief, because there they no longer have to go through the bourgeois motions; they can react into the only other attitude they know, the ‘widely’ cynical.
It would be extraordinarily illuminating, and extraordinarily difficult, to trace the links between all this and some attitudes among more intellectual people during the last three decades; the connexions between the ‘I couldn’t care less’ of the rankers, the ‘anything goes’ of bright young things, and some prevalent intellectual positions. Thus it seems to me that there is sometimes, in this last milieu, a particular enjoyment in the game of disconnected ‘knowingness’, in blowing the froth off each other’s intellectual small beer, in the Swedish drill, for its own sake, of a well-informed mind, in some of the forms in which acute intellectual curiosity operates from a non-attached base. There is sometimes a fear of emotion disguising itself as a rejection of sentimentality, an extreme suspicion of any talk about ‘ends and values’, a tendency to evade such challenges by the device of oblique and clever ‘cracks’. There is often a shrugging-away of authority, not simply of authority in others, but of the authority which is at times required from us – as may be seen in some schoolmasters with their senior forms or evening-classes, some adult education tutors, some young dons in seminars. Riddled by a fuzzy form of egalitarianism, ridden with doubt and self-doubt, believing nothing and able to honour almost no one; in such circumstances we stand on nothing and so can stand for nothing. We are tempted to make the ‘all pals together’ spirit take the place of such authority as our position asks us at least to aim to evoke.
‘The teachers have read Lytton Strachey, and the children’s teeth are set on edge,’ said T. S. Eliot. So are the teeth of the teachers. These attitudes can therefore be an expression of a kind of honesty and dignity. But there can also be an astringent pleasure in the condition. ‘Intellectual sadism’ has its rewards, critical assertion is much less open to attack than creative absorption; there is some amusement and some safety in calling continually, ‘Your lie is showing/ Your creed is creased.’
There are a great number of parallels and variant forms of all this in the literature of the time, and at all levels; for example, in Hemingway, Maugham, Huxley, Waugh, P. H. Newby (see the central character in Mariner Dances), Henry Green (see, for instance, Back), Peter Cheyney, Hank Janson, and more recently in the whole presentation of Jim Dixon, in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. These writers are lumped together without any common disparaging implication; they differ in the degree of disinterestedness, which can be gauged only from an actual reading. But all are illuminating the same destructive element.
In giving my illustrations I have deliberately moved some way from working-class people: it is necessary, finally, to try to suggest more precisely the nature of their cynicism. It seems to me that the majority of working-class people are less affected by cynicism as ‘cashing-in’ than by cynicism as emptiness. Yet that, as I have said, provides further ground for the spread of self-indulgence. Most working-class people have been affected by the developments I have tried to outline, have been to some degree ‘disenchanted’ and find themselves now ‘mocked by unmeaning’. In almost everyone the shyness about belief has some effect. The refusal to ‘give out’ for fear of being diddled means the acceptance eventually of a flat, tough, and tasteless world.
Meanwhile, home is an important refuge; local life can go on, not as yet much affected; a craft can be a private stay: in their public aspects many working-class people are set back, and withdraw into a hurt but also sometimes an indulgent cynicism. It is difficult, by its nature, to find more than a very brief expression of the main attitudes from within the working-class themselves. But this from an ex-minor-public-school-boy down on his luck speaks for much in the experience of working-class people of his generation as well as for those of his own class:
It’s all very well for the moralists to talk… but… from school right into a bloody war that wasn’t my making. Frightened to death half the time, so bored the other half that there was nothing to do but go to bed with a pretty girl. Then back to civvy street, peddling these blank machines and walking ten miles a day for fat old women to shut their doors in my face.