Most typical of Faulkner’s approach is Absalom, Absalom! for in addition to its plot, this book, like The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying, is notoriously difficult. Faulkner imposes strong demands on the reader – flashbacks in time, rapid alternation in viewpoint without warning, obscure references that are only explained later.62 His aim is to show the reader the confusion of society, unhelped by the author’s guiding hand. Just as his characters work on themselves to create their identities and fortunes, the reader must work out Faulkner’s meaning.63
Absalom, Absalom! begins when Miss Rosa Coldfield summons Quentin Compson, a friend and amateur historian, and tells him a story about the rise and fad of Thomas Sutpen, the founder of a southern dynasty whose son, Henry, shot his friend Charles Bon, who he had fought with in the war, causing the demise of the dynasty.64 What motive could Henry Sutpen have had for killing his best friend? Gradually Compson fills in the gaps in the story – using his imagination where facts are too sparse.65 Eventually, the mystery is solved. Charles Bon was actually the fruit of an earlier union by Thomas Sutpen and a Negro (and therefore his eldest child). In Sutpen’s refusal to recognise his eldest son, we see the ‘great guilt’ underlying the whole edifice of the dynasty, and by implication the South itself. Faulkner does not shirk the moral dilemmas, but his main aim was to describe the pain that is their consequence. While Charles Johnson catalogued the shortcomings of northern urban American society, Faulkner illuminated – with sympathy – that the South had its imperfections too.
If race was (still) America’s abiding problem, in Europe and particularly in Britain it was class that divided people. Here, one man who did so much to publicise the great poverty associated with Britain’s lower classes, especially in the 1930s following the great crash, was the writer and reporter George Orwell. It was no accident that Orwell was a reporter as well as a novelist, or that he should prefer reportage to bring home his message. The great age of reportage, as Eric Hobsbawm tells us, had only recently begun, in the 1920s, following the growth of new media, like Time and newsreels. The word reportage itself first appeared in French dictionaries in 1929, and in English in 1931. Many novelists of the time (Ernest Hemingway, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis) were or had been or would become reporters.66
Orwell, born Eric Blair in the remote town of Motihari in Bengal, northwest of Calcutta, on 25 June 1903, received a conventional – that is to say, privileged – middle-class upbringing in Britain. He went to Saint Cyprian’s school near Eastbourne, where Cyril Connolly was a friend and where he wet the bed, then was sent to Wellington and Eton.67 After school he joined the Indian imperial police and served in Burma. Dissatisfied with his role in the imperial police, Blair cut short his time in Burma and began his career as a writer. ‘Feeling tainted by his “success” as a young officer in the East, he wanted to shun anything that reminded him of the unjust system which he had served. “I felt that I had got to escape not merely from imperialism but from every form of man’s dominion over man,” he explained later. “Failure seemed to me to be the only virtue. Every suspicion of self-advancement, even to ‘succeed’ in life to the extent of making a few hundreds a year, seemed to me spiritually ugly, a species of bullying.” ‘68
It is too simple to say that Blair’s desire not to succeed was the direct result of his experience in Burma.69 The idea had planted itself in his mind long before he became a police officer. Saint Cyprian’s, says his biographer Michael Shelden, had prejudiced him against success very early in life by giving him such a corrupt view of merit. Winning was the only thing that mattered at the school, and one became a winner by ‘being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people’ – in short, ‘by getting the better of them in every way.’ Later, he put it like this: ‘Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.’70 He was made to feel that he was one of the weak, and that, whatever he did ‘he would never be a winner. The one consolation for him was the knowledge that there was honour in losing. One could take pride in rejecting the wrong view of success … I could accept my failure and make the best of it.’71 Of Orwell’s four most famous books, two explored in reportorial fashion the weakest (and poorest) elements of society, the flotsam of the 1930s capitalist world. The other two, produced after World War II, explored the nature of power, success, and the way they so easily become abused.
After leaving the police, Blair stayed with his parents for a few months but in the autumn of 1927 found a small room in the Portobello Road, in west London. He tried his hand at fiction and began to explore the East End of the city, living cheek by jowl with tramps and beggars in order to understand how the poor lived, and to experience something of their suffering.72 Having rejected ‘every form of man’s dominion over man,’ he wanted ‘to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against their tyrants.’ Blair worried at his appearance on these visits. He acquired a shabby coat, black dungaree trousers, ‘a faded scarf, and a rumpled cap’. He changed the way he spoke, anxious that his educated accent would give him away. He soon grew to know the seedy area around the West India docks, mixing with stevedores, merchant sailors, and unemployed labourers and sleeping at a common lodging house in Limehouse Causeway (paying nine pence a night). Being accepted in this way, he decided to go ‘on the road’ and for a while meandered through the outreaches of the East End, overnighting in dingy ‘spikes’ – the barracks of local workhouses. These sallies formed the backbone of Down and Out in Paris and London, which came out in 1933. Of course, Orwell was never really down and out; as Michael Shelden says, his tramping was something of a game, one that reflected his ambivalence toward his own background, his ambitions, and his future. But the game was not entirely frivolous. The best way he could help those who were less fortunate was to speak up for them, ‘to remind the rest of the world that they existed, that they were human beings who deserved better and that their pain was real.’73
In 1929 Orwell went to Paris, to show that the misery wasn’t confined to just one country. There he took a small room at a run-down hotel in the rue du Pot de Fer, a narrow, mean lane in the Latin Quarter. He described the walls of his room as thin; ‘there was dirt everywhere in the building and bugs were a constant nuisance.’74 He suffered a nervous breakdown.75 There were more cheerful neighborhoods not far away, however, in one of which could be found the Ecole Normale Supérieure, where Jean-Paul Sartre was a star pupil and where Samuel Beckett was just beginning to teach. Further on was the place de la Contrescarpe, which Hemingway describes in The Snows of Kilimanjaro, affectionately sketching its mix of ‘drunks, prostitutes, and respectable working folk.’76 Orwell says in the book that he was the victim of a theft that left him almost penniless.77