George Orwell was many things—martyr, masochist, moralist,
Etonian malcontent—but he was not a particularly scrupulous scholar. So we should treat with caution his claim, in
the 1945 essay “Good Bad Books,” that it was G.K. Chesterton who coined the
phrase “good bad book” to describe “the kind of book that has no literary pretensions
but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.” The attribution has been much-repeated, but
attempts to track it down founder. To
the best of my knowledge, the closest Chesterton came to defining a “good bad
book” was to write in defense of the then critically-despised popular forms
such as the penny dreadful and the detective story in essays collected in his
1901 book The Defendant. The term “good bad book,” as Orwell uses it,
appears to be his own coinage, perhaps attributed to Chesterton unintentionally
through the vagaries of memory.
Orwell divides the empire of the Good Bad Book into two
principalities. The first of these is
comprised of the various forms of escapist literature (in which he includes the
Sherlock Holmes stories, Booth Trakington’s Penrod stories, as well as some
thrillers and comic writings). The
second is made up of books that, “attain sincerity partly because they are not
inhibited by good taste.” The authors of
books in this latter category generally identify so fully with their characters
and invite such complete sympathy from the readers that they lack critical
distance from those characters—they inhabit the sensibility of their characters
“with a kind of abandonment that cleverer people would find difficult to
achieve.” Lack of self-consciousness is
important to this second kind of good bad book—the author of such a book “only
partly grasps the pathetic vulgarity of the people he is writing about, and therefore
does not despise them.” In this sort of
book we enter into full and uncritical sympathy with the sort of figure we
would normally recoil from—but because the author himself lacks
self-consciousness, we go along for the ride with Dionysian abandon. We’re not talking about something clever like
Nabokov’s Lolita, in which the author
plays complex games of sympathy for the devil.
We’re talking about the unselfconscious reveling in an odious or limited
or pathetic ethos that we find in, say, Norman Podhoretz’s Making It. The sincerity is
everything.
The melodramatic mawkishness of Uncle Tom’s Cabin makes it a bad book, says Orwell, yet he finds in
it a kind of righteousness that is essentially true and moving, making it a
good bad book that, he predicts, will outlast “the complete works of Virginia
Woolf or George Moore.” It has already
outlived George Moore in the popular imagination. Woolf? Well, we’ll have to wait and see. And since Orwell gives no timeframe, we’ll
never reach a point where we can say he was definitely wrong.
Orwell has precious little to say about poetry in “Good Bad
Books,” except that there are some music hall songs that, while lacking in
subtlety and conscious craftsmanship, nevertheless embody a real sincerity and
power, as does this one:
Come where the booze is cheaper,
Come where the pots hold more,
Come where the boss is a bit of a sport,
Come to the pub next door!
The sentiment may be little different from “Sometimes you
want to go/where everybody knows your name/And they’re always glad you came”
(that, for you young ‘uns, is from the theme song to the sitcom Cheers)—but simple and sentimental as
that sentiment may be, it is sincere and endures. Orwell tells us he would “far rather have
written” a stanza like this than “The Blessed Damozel” or “Love in a Valley.”
If we’d like to refine our sense of what a good bad poet, we
could do worse than to look to another of Orwell’s essays, “Rudyard Kipling,”
written three years prior to “Good Bad Books.”
Here, Orwell assesses Kipling’s achievement by taking a look at what
T.S. Eliot had said about the author of Barrack-Room
Ballads. “Mr. Eliot,” Orwell tells
us, “says that what is held against [Kipling] is that he expressed unpopular
views in a popular style. This narrows
the issue by assuming that ‘unpopular’ means unpopular with the
intelligentsia…” At this point you probably think you know where Orwell’s going
with this. You probably think he’s going
to say that Kipling expressed views that, while unpopular with the intelligentsia,
were popular with the broad reading public.
But that’s not it! Where we think
Orwell’s going to zig, he zags, saying:
…but it is a fact that Kipling’s
‘message’ was one that the big public did not want, and, indeed, has never
accepted. The mass of people, in the
‘nineties as now, were anti-militarist, bored by the Empire, and only
unconsciously patriotic. Kipling’s
official admirers are and were the “service” middle class… In the stupid early
years of this century, the blimps, [i.e., the pompous reactionaries] having at
last discovered someone who could be called a poet and who was on their side,
set Kipling on a pedestal, and some of his more sententious poems, such as
“If,” were given almost Biblical status.
This is fascinating stuff.
The reading public in Kipling’s day was both larger and less homogenous
than it was in Tennyson’s heyday, and the poet could no longer presume to speak
to, and for, the vast majority of the readership (this had huge implications for the development of poetry in the early
twentieth century—it takes two chapters of the book I’ve been working on, Making Nothing Happen: Poetry in Society,
Poetry for Itself, just to scratch the surface). But for a part of that reading public, a part
that felt itself misunderstood and taken for granted by the majority of the
population, Kipling was a voice, a poet who articulated what they believed in
and the codes by which they lived. “The
White Man’s Burden” expressed a bitter late-imperial sentiment that belonged
more to them than to the British reading public as a whole.
And this is where we can see Kipling as a good bad poet, in
the sense of sincerely and unselfconsciously expressing an ethos that doesn’t
stand up to enlightened examination. To
kidnap a phrase from Orwell’s other essay, Kipling, as poet, “only partly
grasps the pathetic vulgarity of the people he is writing about, and therefore
does not despise them.” And we get to go
along for the ride, because Kipling’s belief in the perspectives from which he
writes is so sincere and heartfelt—he truly, madly, deeply loves the Empire! He might not
have been a good poet in a way that cultivated readers of poetry appreciate,
but Kipling the poet resonated beyond the little valley of the literati where
executives fear to tread. He was a good
bad poet.
But can we have another Kipling? Can there be a good bad poet now? The prospects for someone that serious poetry
readers admire becoming truly popular are dim, and were already dim in the
1940s when Orwell wrote:
It is no use pretending in an age
like our own, “good” poetry can have any genuine popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few
people, the least tolerated of the arts.
Perhaps that statement needs a certain amount of qualification. True poetry can sometimes be acceptable to
the mass of people when it disguises itself as something else…. But in general
ours is a civilization in which the very word ‘poetry evokes a hostile snigger.
But what about a poet the literati do not care for, except
perhaps with a kind of asterisk attached, and a little footnote saying “guilty
pleasure” or “there’s something about the sentiment, but this is not to be
entirely admired”? We’d need a poet who
could articulate for a large class of people the sentiment they hold most dear,
but at present those sentiment tend to be articulated elsewhere: by popular
culture (in commercially mediated forms) and by the new popular culture of
video clips and social media. It seems
unlikely that a good bad poet will emerge in the West in our time.
Of course the question of the good bad poet, such as
Kipling, raises another question, that of the bad good poet. But I don’t feel the urge to write about P.B.
Shelley.
