Paper is Precious, Through Eastern Eyes, 8 January 1942

Paper is Precious, Through Eastern Eyes, 8 January 1942

When is an Orwell script not an Orwell script – and vice versa; when is a script not attributed to Orwell actually by the man himself? These questions are prompted by two pieces from the archives this week. The first, Weekly News Review, 4, broadcast as part of “Through Eastern Eyes” on 3 Jan 1942, needn’t detain us too long; the second, Paper is Precious, also broadcast as part of “Through Eastern Eyes”, on 8 Jan, 1942, a little longer.

Prof Peter Davison, who publishes the former as item 915 in the Complete Works, notes the authorship is attributed to Eric Blair. It was read, though, by ZA Bokhari. Would one be able to tell that Orwell had written it, without confirmation of the fact? It seems highly doubtful. The digest of war news possesses an argument about the relative strength of Britain’s position compared to the year before, when taking into account the 26-strong nation pact against Fascism, the disconnectedness of the Axis powers compared to the Allies, and disasters in Russia for the Nazis: “Now, the three greatest population blocks of the world, the USA, Soviet Russia and China are on Britain’s side, and in return Germany has only gained the assistance of Japan.”

When contrasted with the grim days in which Britain stood alone – a moment of reckoning and resolve captured in Three Days in May, Ben Brown’s intriguing historical-hypothetical drama about Winston Churchill’s “wobble” in 1940, currently running at the Trafalgar Studios – the outlook for the country is significantly rosier than it might have been, but the piece fights shy of any premature propagandist triumphalism. Inasmuch as it strives at concision and accuracy – it betrays Orwell’s authorship, but its tone is far too neutral – and indeed neutered – to offer any satisfying instances of his “voice”. It could have been written by any decent BBC journalistic hand.

The same is not true of the essay “Paper is Precious” – which has, as Davison notes, Orwell’s “style, content, and attitude” – and yet there remains no categorical assurance of it having been written by him. It was read by “B Sahni” – but could also have been written by him. Davison includes it, and one feels not to have done so would have been an omission. But of course if the piece really wasn’t by Orwell then we must allow that other people could “sound” in print remarkably like him or that he wrote in a style which wasn’t necessarily as distinct as we suppose. On balance, I think it safe enough to assume this is Orwell, albeit writing using the first-person in such a way that the “I” will be, as it were, on loan.

“I want to tell you something about the results of this [paper] shortage,” the script runs in the first paragraph – “and it is a curious fact that though most of them are bad, some of them are good”. Already our attention is gripped; here’s a viewpoint that finds solace by upending received wisdoms. Some kind of intellectual purification has happened to popular culture as a result of the dearth of paper, it is suggested; “Not the biggest, but perhaps the most striking result brought about by the paper shortage is the dwindling of advertisements. England is a country in which, before the war, every available wall was defaced with enormous posters – posters usually advertising food and patent medicines – in brilliant and generally hideous colours. I don’t believe that anyone, except perhaps the advertisers themselves, was sorry to see them disappearing, and the bare walls look much nicer without them. As I walked through a Tube station the other night, I noticed that though a few of the big posters urging you to buy beer or chocolate were still there, all of them were old ones, probably dating from before the war.”

Hard not to glimpse a pre-figuring in that phrase “enormous posters” of the fluttering party posters of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the revulsion at garish advertising that George Bowling expresses in Coming Up For Air; or is that just fancy – and was it someone other than Orwell who took that journey through the Tube station? The more you read, the more the sense of a well-known “voice” takes hold, one that respects quality over quantity, frugality over mass consumption:

“But the biggest effect of the paper shortage – and here the results are partly bad, partly good – can be seen in the newspapers and the press generally. English newspapers are now so small, comparatively speaking, that it is becoming difficult to believe that they were ever really the size they used to be. A few weeks back I happened to turn out from the bottom of a drawer a “Times” of before the war. It seemed so enormous that I found myself wondering not only how anyone could have read through such a bulk of print every day, but even how anyone could hold up a document of such weight in order to read it. Would you credit that nowadays the ordinary English newspaper consists only of four pages – that is, two sheets, of which a certain amount is taken up in photographs? …

“Now this result of the paper shortage seems to me on the whole a good one, and I will tell you why. English papers of before the war were terribly commercialised, and their huge bulk was filled up not only with advertisements for useless luxuries but with imbecilities of every kind – silly news items about burglaries and the private lives of film stars, gossip about lipstick and silk stockings, enormous articles on sport, pages and pages of horse-racing results, even columns of astrology and fortune-telling – any and every kind of cheap sensation calculated to push the real news out of the reader’s attention. This was not the case with quite all the English newspapers but it was the case with most of them. Well, all that kind of thing has gone by the board. The newspapers have very little space to fill up, and Britain is at war, so that there are long official communiqués to be printed every day. Naturally, it is the rubbish that gets crowded out first…”

When the speaker turns to talk about the possible benefits that a nationwide lack of paper might have on literary forms, we’re immediately cast back to the London Letter of 1 Jan: “The paper shortage seems to be favouring the appearance of very short books, which may be all to the good and may possibly bring back the “long-short story…”

The sentiment here is almost identical: “But if you turn from the daily papers to what one may call high-brow literature, the effects of the paper shortage have been mostly bad. … The length of books is more affected by merely mechanical considerations than we sometimes realise, and the vogues of very long novels in the ten years preceding the war was probably bound up with the fact that paper is cheap. It is quite likely that the paper famine will bring in a vogue for the very short novel, the so-called long-short story, a form which has always been popular in France, but has seldom prospered in England…”

The thought expressed in the final paragraph, which effectively identifies “globalisation” decades before it becomes standard currency, elevates the piece to something lastingly valuable – as prophetic as it is historically specific. “The shortage of paper is not one of the major privations of the war, and in any case our own shortage is nothing to what the Germans have suffered from the very beginning. But like all the shifts to which one is put in wartime, it is having its effect upon our national life, and like the disappearance of bananas, and the shortage of phosphorus for matches, it brings home to one that the world nowadays is a single economic unit and that no part of the world can be separated from any other without suffering hardship in consequence.”

It’s got to be Orwell, hasn’t it? What if it isn’t though? Can one hold two thoughts in one’s head at once – that it must be him, but also might just possibly not be? It’s not a mystery as great as the unfinished Edwin Drood but to me it has set in chain a whole series of thoughts about what gives Orwell his distinctive “timbre”.

Dominic Cavendish