Tribune, 13 DECEMBER 1946
Recently I received a copy of Sir Stanley Unwin’s interesting and useful book, The Truth about Publishing, which has appeared in a number of editions from 1926 onwards, and has recently been expanded and brought up to date. I particularly value it because it assembles certain figures which one might have difficulty in finding elsewhere. A year or so ago, writing in Tribune on the cost of reading matter, I made a guess at the average yearly expenditure on books in this country, and put it at £1 a head. It seems that I was pitching it too high. Here are some figures of national expenditure in 1945:—
| Alcoholic beverages | £685 millions |
| Tobacco | £548 millions |
| Books | £23 millions |
In other words the average British citizen spends about 2d. a week on books, whereas he spends nearly 10 shillings on drink and tobacco.1 I suppose this noble figure of 2d. would include the amount spent on school textbooks and other books which are bought, so to speak, involuntarily. Is it any wonder that when recently a questionnaire was sent out by Horizon, asking twenty-one poets and novelists how they thought a writer could best earn his living, not one of them said plainly that he might earn it by writing books?
When one reads the reports of UNO conferences, or international negotiations of any kind, it is difficult not to be reminded of L’Attaque and similar war games that children used to play,2 with cardboard pieces representing battleships, aeroplanes and so forth, each of which had a fixed value and could be countered in some recognised way. In fact, one might almost invent a new game called Uno, to be played in enlightened homes where the parents do not want their children to grow up with a militaristic outlook.
The pieces in this game are called the proposal, the démarche, the formula, the stumbling block, the stalemate, the deadlock, the bottleneck and the vicious circle. The object of the game is to arrive at a formula, and though details vary, the general outline of play is always much the same. First the players assemble, and somebody leads off with the proposal. This is countered by the stumbling block, without which the game could not develop. The stumbling block then changes into a bottleneck, or more often into a deadlock or a vicious circle. A deadlock and a vicious circle occurring simultaneously produce a stalemate, which may last for weeks. Then suddenly someone plays the démarche. The démarche makes it possible to produce a formula, and once the formula has been found the players can go home, leaving everything as it was at the beginning.
At the moment of writing, the front page of my morning paper has broken out into a pink rash of optimism. It seems that everything is going to be all right after all. The Russians will agree to inspection of armaments, and the Americans will internationalise the atomic bomb. On another page of the same paper are reports of events in Greece which amount to a state of war between the two groups of powers who are being so chummy in New York.
But while the game of deadlocks and bottlenecks goes on, another more serious game is also being played. It is governed by two axioms. One is that there can be no peace without a general surrender of sovereignty: the other is that no country capable of defending its sovereignty ever surrenders it. If one keeps these axioms in mind one can generally see the relevant facts in international affairs through the smoke-screen with which the newspapers surround them. At the moment the main facts are:—
These, although they may be superseded later, are at present the real counters in the real game, and one gets nearer the truth by constantly remembering them than by alternately rejoicing and despairing over the day-to-day humbug of conferences.