What inspires Bowling to take his sentimental journey is the imminence of war in Britain. Was it inevitable or not?
I see it all. I see the posters and the food-queues, and the castor oil and the rubber truncheons and the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. Is it going to happen? No knowing. Some days it’s impossible to believe it. Some days I say to myself that it’s just a scare got up by the newspapers. Some days I know in my bones there’s no escaping it.
Those words, “rubber truncheons” appear seven times in the novel. They appear in Orwell's journalism as well. To suggest that they were a peculiar fixation of Orwell’s is to pretend that their appearance wasn’t deliberate. George Bowling wanted to know if such things were coming to sleepy old England. So he tells us about the world of his childhood and goes back 25 years later to see if any of it is left. Just as he is getting used to the reality that the past – the world he knew before the last war – has completely vanished, a bomber on a training run drops a bomb on the town by mistake. (Orwell describes the aftermath with telling details, like a thin stream of marmalade oozing along the floor of a demolished house mixing with another stream of blood.)
I’ll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it was this. IT’S ALL GOING TO HAPPEN. All the things you’ve got at the back of your mind, the things you’re terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. It’s all going to happen. I know it—at any rate, I knew it then. There’s no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there’s no way out. It’s just something that’s got to happen.
And what terrifies Bowling even more than war is the “after-war”:
The world we’re going down into, the kind of hate-world, sloganworld. The coloured shirts, the barbed wire, the rubber truncheons. The secret cells where the electric light burns night and day, and the detectives watching you while you sleep. And the processions and the posters with enormous faces, and the crowds of a million people all cheering for the Leader till they deafen themselves into thinking that they really worship him, and all the time, underneath, they hate him so that they want to puke.
The after-war world that Bowling predicts never got as far as England. Orwell expanded on it in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four, but it was one that was all too familiar in the occupied countries of Europe. The British government knew that war was coming, but the avoidance of war at all costs was their guiding principle. Before war was declared, Germany had already re-taken the Rhineland, absorbed Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia with no one to oppose them. It was somewhat reasonable to assume that appeasement would go on until the Germans possessed all of Europe. Whatever you did, appease the Nazis or not, the coming catastrophe could not be averted.
When France was invaded in May 1940, its leaders decided, after just 6 weeks, to capitulate rather than put up a fight. The fall of France in June 1940 was eventually blamed by the Vichy government on the Third Republic and its failure to take Nazi Germany seriously, even after the invasion and rapid conquest of Poland, and to prepare France for when its turn would come.
But the Vichy government, anxious to place the blame for their cowardice elsewhere than squarely on themselves, also named certain films for having effectively demoralized France in the ominous months before the blitzkrieg arrived. This seems hard to comprehend even now, 80 years later. But two particular films, both masterpieces, were singled out for having grasped the terrible mood of the moment and for having indelibly expressed it. The two films were Marcel Carné’s Le jour se lêve and Jean Renoir’s La règle du jeu. The films were banned and were both thought to be lost by the time of the liberation four extraordinarily long years later.
The vulnerability of France in 1939 was greater than anyone realized. It was best expressed in the last great effulgence of creativity on defiant display in its cinema. Jean Renoir, who had achieved popular success with the realistic melodrama, La bête humaine, in 1938, was given what grew into the biggest budget ever for a French film to make a film that was initially intended to be entertaining. When the film, La règle du jeu, was released on July 7, audience reaction varied from unfavorable to hostile. The producer demanded that Renoir cut the film, including all the scenes in which he himself appeared in the role of Octave. The cuts, eventually amounting to thirty minutes, simply made the film more confusing and audiences more hostile to it, until the French government banned it outright as detrimental to national morale.
Like Orwell’s Coming Up for Air, the climax of Jean Renoir’s 1939 film The Rules of the Game takes place with an explosion – in the film’s case with a shotgun blast. Andre Jurieu is shot to death by Schumacher, a groundskeeper who mistakenly believes he is absconding with his wife. It is a completely unforeseeable end to the film, viewed by some as a satire on the French upper class on the eve of World War II. Renoir did everything he could to appease the public and cut and cut and cut his film, noting the things the audience didn’t like and removing them as much as possible. One of the things about the film that no one seemed to like was Renoir himself in the role of Octave. But why?
Octave, although old friends of Robert and of Christine’s family, and a close confidant of Andre, is a peripheral character is every way. He is a hanger-on, without a title or a profession or any apparent means of income. If he resembles any other character in the film it is Marceau, the tramp poacher. In fact, one of the most touching scenes in film takes place near the very end, after Andre has been killed. Having to some extent caused the “accident” (he’s the one who brings Andre to Robert’s country estate and Schumacher was convinced that he was shooting Octave), he knows that it’s time to go. Octave and Marceau are leaving together, in the dead of night, and as they walk away from the chateau there is the following exchange:
Octave: “Where are you headed?”
Marceau: “Back to the woods. I’ll try to pick up some odd jobs here and there. And you?”
Octave: “I’m going back to Paris. I’ll try to manage on my own.”
Marceau: “We may run into each other again some day.”
Octave: “I doubt it. But you never know. Anything’s possible. Good luck!”
Marceau: “Good luck!”
Renoir’s film turned out to be a kind of memorial to a moment in history so fragile and transitory that it could never have lasted. Even before his film was finished the moment had passed. This is what gives the film a strange, lustrous beauty – we are witnessing the end of a society. Renoir enlisted in the French army film department and remained in France into 1940. When the invasion took place, he wisely fled to Hollywood. The maker of the pacifist film La Grande Illusion, that had dared to suggest that Germans and Frenchmen were brothers and that war was a big illusion, Renoir's name was high on Hitler’s list of people to be arrested by the Gestapo
Meanwhile, under the blitz in England, George Orwell seemed to enjoy the straightened conditions. According to John Carey, “Friends believed that he actually the shortages and discomforts of the war. He welcomed clothes rationing, and longed for the time when moths would have devoured the last dinner-jacket even if it meant everyone wearing dyed battle-dress in the interim.”
Such, such are my thoughts in the middle of my first week of self-quarantine here on my island among the tinkling palms. The virus has yet to penetrate this far. But the pandemic is still young.
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