As I was Saying

George Orwell

Review of The Democrat at the Supper Table by Colm Brogan (Hollis and Carter, 8s. 6d.)

Narcissism is a normal motive of novelists, including some of the best novelists. To act with firmness and daring in moments of danger, to right injustices, to be a dominating personality, to exercise fascination on the opposite sex, and to horsewhip one’s private enemies – these things are more easily achieved on paper than in real life, and it is an unusual novel that does not contain somewhere or other a portrait of the author, thinly disguised as hero, saint, or martyr. This is particularly noticeable in conversational novels, to which class Mr Brogan’s book belongs. Without actually imitating Chesterton, Mr Brogan has obviously been influenced by him, and his central character has a Father Brown-like capacity for getting the better of an argument, and also for surrounding himself with fools and scoundrels whose function is to lead up to his wisecracks.

The action – or rather the series of discussions of which the book consists – takes place in a private hotel. The ‘I’ of the story describes himself as a Democrat and also appears to be a Catholic: sharing the supper-table with him are a Jewish Communist, a schoolmaster of advanced views, an Indian Nationalist, a business man, a poet, and the proprietress of the hotel. The three first-named are frankly stooges. The business man, on the other hand, is allowed to show occasional gleams of common sense, while the poet is an enigmatic character, inclined at times to take sides with the narrator, and the proprietress is the typical Chestertonian female, a being devoid of logic but possessing a wisdom which goes beyond that of the mere male. As the arguments turn chiefly upon the question of free enterprise versus State control and the extension of the school-leaving age, the experienced reader can foresee in advance a good deal of what each of the debaters will say.

Nevertheless, when one compares this book with its predecessors of ten or twenty years ago, one cannot help being struck by the retreat that Conservativism – using this word in a wide sense – has already had to make. Mr Brogan is defending capitalism, and he expends considerable ingenuity in showing that Britain would have a better chance of recapturing her share of the world markets with a ‘free’ economy than with nationalised industries. He does not, like Chesterton, pretend that it would be possible to step back into the Middle Ages and that great blocks of the people are yearning to do so. He even defends mass production and is ready to accept the principle of social insurance, though he is opposed to making it compulsory. He opposes a unitary educational system and the raising of the school-leaving age, but on the other hand he wants to spend more money on the infant schools, and he does not say, as similar thinkers would have said a little while ago, that parents should have the right to decide whether their children are to be educated or not. In effect the book is a rearguard action – a defense of the past, but inspired by a consciousness that there is not very much left to defend.

However, the conversations follow the usual pattern. The Communist is a bad-blooded creature who drags references to Soviet Russia into almost every sentence. The schoolmaster is a windbag. The Indian is a mass of vague uplift and imaginary grievances, and even the business man, hard-headed in his own line, is taken in by the Dean of Canterbury’s sermons. As for the narrator, he is a paragon of wit, learning, intellectuality, broad-mindedness, and common sense, and if he finally fails to convert the others to his point of view it is because their minds have already been rotted by the follies of modern education.

The trouble with all books of this kind is a sort of querulousness that arises from not really having a practical programme to offer. Mr Brogan is probably aware that there will be no return to laissez-faire capitalism, just as Chesterton must have been aware, at moments, that there would be no return to peasant proprietorship. Probably too, he is aware that it is not much use telling people that compulsory education, compulsory social insurance, control of investments, and direction of labour add up to slavery, since even if it is true, the great mass of the people would far rather have slavery than the alternative.

The world is going in a certain direction that he does not like, but he is unable to think of any other direction in which it could actually be induced to go. So he takes the essentially defensive line of pointing out the absurdities and monstrosities of ‘advanced’ thought – which, after all, is not very difficult. But it is not by these methods that anyone who is not in agreement with him already will be brought to think twice about Communism, feminism, atheism, pacifism, or any of the other -isms that Mr Brogan dislikes.

Observer, 10^th February 1946