Out of the Ordinary

How Everyday Life Inspired a Nation and How It Can Again

Marc Stears

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780674250130
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From a major British political thinker and activist, a passionate case that both the left and right have lost their faith in ordinary people and must learn to find it again. This is an age of polarization. It's us vs. them. The battle lines are clear, and compromise is surrender.As Out of the Ordinary reminds us, we have been here before. From the 1920s to the 1950s, in a world transformed by revolution and war, extreme ideologies of left and right fueled utopian hopes and dystopian fears. In response, Marc Stears writes, a group of British writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers showed a way out. These men and women, including J. B. Priestley, George Orwell, Barbara Jones, Dylan Thomas, Laurie Lee, and Bill Brandt, had no formal connection to one another. But they each worked to forge a politics that resisted the empty idealisms and totalizing abstractions of their time. Instead they were convinced that people going about their daily lives possess all the insight, virtue, and determination required to build a good society. In poems, novels, essays, films, paintings, and photographs, they gave witness to everyday people's ability to overcome the supposedly insoluble contradictions between tradition and progress, patriotism and diversity, rights and duties, nationalism and internationalism, conservatism and radicalism. It was this humble vision that animated the great Festival of Britain in 1951 and put everyday citizens at the heart of a new vision of national regeneration.A leading political theorist and a veteran of British politics, Stears writes with unusual passion and clarity about the achievements of these apostles of the ordinary. They helped Britain through an age of crisis. Their ideas might do so again, in the United Kingdom and beyond.

1

Getting Out of the Whale

DURING THE BRITISH GENERAL ELECTION OF 2015, I worked as the personal speechwriter to the Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband. Politics is a tough business, and there were all kinds of ups and downs in that role. Most regular among the downs were disputes about what was worth writing—or speaking—about and what wasn’t. Many of those disputes were utterly predictable. They had to do with different views on the issues of the day: the economy, public spending, foreign policy, immigration, and like. But one issue that I could not have predicted turned out to be the cause of particularly intense disagreements in Ed’s team: the Second World War.

Although few people in the broader population noticed at the time, Ed used to insist on adding a discussion of the war and especially of its immediate aftermath to as many speeches as he could. The need to tackle inequality and restore the welfare state? Ed would take it back to the Beveridge Report and the cross-party commitments made at the war’s close. Reform of the health service? He’d reference it back to the founding of the National Health Service in the 1940s. The true meaning of patriotism? It would emerge from a study of VE Day and the celebrations of Nazi collapse.

The reasons for this desire for constant reference were manifold. Ed believed the war was an issue that crossed traditional political boundaries, making a self-consciously radical politician more palatable to voters in the middle. He was also acutely aware that his own father fought in the war, having arrived in Britain as an immigrant, a refugee from the Nazis, and that made him immensely proud. He might also have had a faint memory of being told the kinds of stories I was told about what the country had achieved in the war. Nonetheless, as a rhetorical tactic it rarely worked. Audiences always used to stare blankly at him, utterly uncomprehending. I am sure I will go to my grave remembering an audience of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds at a school in North London sitting with mouths open, clearly thinking: Why is this man in his forties going on about all of this stuff that happened nearly seventy years ago?

The real reason Ed’s stories fell flat was not that they made him seem more elderly than he was but that, for most people in Britain today, he was talking about the wrong aspect of the war. For it is not the victory that British people remember with fondness. It is the privations of war and the peril of its very early years. It is the sense of Britain and the distant lands of its empire being left alone against the world, cast adrift by perfidious former allies and terrifying opponents. The myth of the opening year or two of the war that prevails is that of a heroic moment in dark times, bold leadership against the perfidious cowardice of an out-of-touch elite. Recently, in a speechwriting class I was giving, I played a recording of Winston Churchill’s speech promising “blood, sweat, toil and tears” to a roomful of midcareer accountants at one of the world’s leading professional service firms. Some of them were so moved that their own literal tears joined Churchill’s metaphorical ones.¹

Proof of the power of that story is all around us in the general culture too. When the histories of our own time are written, the Hollywood awards season of 2018 will be remembered for one thing: the Time’s Up and Me Too movements and the downfall of Harvey Weinstein. The memories will be of red carpets and black dresses. But in among the modernity was a lurking reminder of the continuing importance of the war. For the person who picked up all of the leading male actor awards was Gary Oldman, for his performance as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, and scrabbling along, picking up a technical award here and there and nominations for its director, was another wartime epic, Dunkirk. As Brexit negotiations unfurled in 2018 and 2019, the story of Britain standing alone in the conflict, proudly repelling German assault, emerged once again. It is these images, not those of D-day or the postwar reconstruction, that Boris Johnson turned to at the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic to try to inspire the country. And with good reason.

In many ways, the nostalgia is understandable. The sense of purpose, of determination, of pluck, excites us now in a time when we feel that we often lack these very virtues. But when the war actually broke out in 1939, it did not seem heroic to many, and certainly not to those who would later play their part in creating the very myth that we now remember so vividly. In fact, and directly to the contrary, it seemed that the war had no purpose and could lead to no desirable end.

“I can’t raise up any feeling about this war at all,” Dylan Thomas wrote to his friend Bert Trick in 1939. There was nothing in it worth fighting for, nothing worth sacrificing the benefits of a life of peace and relative stability. Not even anti-Fascism excited him. It is all a “fostering of hate against bewildered and buggered people,” he thought.² For these reasons, and, it must also be admitted, as a result of a natural cowardice that he was never overly concerned to hide, Thomas spent the first few months of the conflict scrambling desperately to find someone to endorse his claim to be a conscientious objector, until eventually his own ill health came to his rescue and he was exempted from active service.

The more notable intellectual response to the outbreak of the war came in George Orwell’s now much underappreciated masterpiece Inside the Whale, published just as the war was beginning. Ostensibly an elongated commentary on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Inside the Whale offers an intellectual history of the whole period sparked by the new hostilities. “While I have been writing this book another European war has broken out,” Orwell wrote, and like Thomas he was clear that the prospects for such a war were bleak. Orwell possessed none of the Churchillian faith in the triumph of freedom and reason over an authoritarian foe. Not for him the patriotic excitement in blood, sweat, and tears or a sense that Fascism had finally met its match. All he could feel was a slow, throbbing fear. The war “will either last several years and tear Western civilization to pieces, or it will end inconclusively and prepare the way for yet another war which will do the job once and for all.”³

The primary reason for Orwell’s pessimism was his deep sense that even if Britain prevailed in the fight against Fascism, there was little prospect of a better future ahead. For Orwell, the late 1930s were a time of extraordinary pessimism. It was more than just a reluctance to put one’s own life, or the lives of others, at risk that animated this concern. It was a sense that Britain had taken the wrong path since the end of the previous conflict. Although there was little doubt that Hitler was a grave evil, it was not clear what was being fought for. The years between the First World War and the Second, Orwell believed, had created two alternatives, neither of which had any appeal.

Inside the Whale lays out the charge sheet against the interwar years impeccably. In it, Orwell put the novelists, poets, playwrights, and associated thinkers who had shaped British culture in the years since the First World War on trial, as if he held them personally responsible for the horror that was about to come to pass. The 1920s and 1930s were a time of terrible ideological mistakes, he concluded, a period in which politics had taken wrong turn after wrong turn, leaving the country with almost nothing to stand for, nothing to care about protecting.

For our purposes here, it is vital to return to those mistakes. That is in part because we will see some striking similarities with our own times in these troubled decades. The division of politics into two warring tribes—one that placed the emphasis on a nostalgic longing for lost culture and tradition, and one that hurled itself into an eager pursuit of enormous economic and cultural transformation—will be familiar to anyone who has been watching Britain and much of the rest of the world tear itself apart in the last few years. But it is also worth returning to because understanding what had gone wrong is crucial preparation for appreciating the subtlety and richness of the alternative vision that Orwell and others sought to build as the war unfolded. That they were able to craft such an optimistic story of national renewal against this background should be the source of enormous hope for those of us who try to do the same now.

The task of this chapter, then, is to look back at the interwar years from the perspective of the start of the Second World War—to look, as Orwell had it, inside the whale as Jonah did when he was swallowed alive.

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The First World War did not destroy the landscape of Britain as it did that of France, but the devastation that it wreaked was just as real. It led to a gigantic loss of faith in established institutions, political decision-making, social conventions, and religion itself.⁴ “What was Christ in us was stuck with a bayonet in the sky,” the young Dylan Thomas wrote to his first lover.⁵ The period that immediately followed was one of great disorientation. The cultural giants of the time captivated the world with their descriptions of the chaos that was unfolding, including James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and Lytton Strachey. The greatest of all the chroniclers of despair in the 1920s, though, was D. H. Lawrence.

Long into the twentieth century, Lawrence’s star still shone brightly as a literary figure. But in the 1920s, his talent for politically engaged cultural observation was unparalleled. Like nobody else, he posed the intellectual questions that would determine the course of history. Born in the small industrial town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, the son of a miner, Lawrence scrambled throughout his short life to understand what was going on in a contemporary society that seemed not only to disappoint but to dislocate the people who lived in it. The much-feted promise of modernity, industrialism, and trade that had captivated the Victorians and Edwardians was, for Lawrence, all just one big lie, and his job was to call it out. For decades, industrial capitalism had wrought utter destruction on England and its people, Lawrence believed. It had built a “world of iron and coal, the cruelty of iron and the smoke of coal, and the endless, endless greed that drove it all.” The First World War had revealed the truth of it in its barest bones: “The cataclysm has happened, we are now among the ruins.”⁶

Yet for Lawrence the horrors of reality were only the start of our problems. The opening phrase of his later novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover captured the whole idea that animated his thinking perfectly: “Ours is a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically,” D. H. Lawrence wrote in that most compelling but misunderstood of novels.⁷ Lawrence’s argument was simple. When confronted with the absolute horrors of war, with the Depression that followed it, and with the blight of industrialism on the landscape and on people’s lives that had led to it, the British elite had not risen to the challenge, but they had hidden, ignoring the pain, the suffering. And they had done so in the most profoundly depressing of ways. They hadn’t simply withdrawn from life or pretended that things were a little bit better than they were. They had drawn fantasies in the sky, painting imaginary pictures of a country of the future, of a society that could magically be transformed as if without effort, whether by nostalgia, nationalism, socialism, Communism, or any other number of abstract beliefs. The empty, theoretical construction of a country “as it should be,” and the fascination that people found in talking about it—endlessly talking about it—was the opiate of the time. It dulled the pain of a reality that was all around them but that was too much to bear.

Lawrence’s most profound telling of this tale was his gut-wrenching short story “England, My England,” published four years after the end of the First World War and worked on for many years before that. Here, Lawrence recounted the life and death of Evelyn Daughtry, an everyday middle-class Englishman, who finds himself fighting in an artillery regiment in France in the First World War. Desperately searching for some reassuring reason for his presence in the war, Daughtry finds himself playing in his mind with all kinds of abstract ideals: patriotism, soldierly authority, allegiance to the noble goals of freedom and self-determination. Over time, he learns how to play the role of the wartime idealist. He gives breath to the right kind of words, holds himself accordingly, and others respond to him. Even his wife loves him more as he mouths platitudes about conflict while wearing his uniform than she had done before.

In his quieter moments, though, Daughtry knows that there is no real truth to these so-called ideals. They are fantasies, based on empty rhetoric. And however hard he tries to reconcile ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Introduction: A Britain Forgotten
• 1. Getting Out of the Whale
• 2. A Little Holding of Ground
• 3. The Properties of My Memory Remain
• 4. All Nations Are Odious, but Some Are Less Odious Than Others
• 5. The Socialists in Power
• 6. Brief City
• 7. Acquaintance plus Wonder
• Conclusion: The Magic of Everyday Life
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index