In may 1941, the English film-maker Humphrey Jennings took time out from work on his new documentary, Listen to Britain, to write to his wife Cicely, who was in New York with their two small daughters for the duration of the war. Morale on the home front, he told her, was not too bad; even so, there was unfortunately "still a bunch of intellectuals here who are afraid of becoming patriots." Unabashedly, indeed ferociously highbrow himself, Jennings was not an irate jingoist grousing about the intelligentsia as a whole. Rather, he felt distaste for that segment of it which-out of principle or just herd instinct-had exempted itself from the bellicose feelings of the British people. Jennings had no sense of awkwardness about his own patriotic fervour, and found his beliefs echoed on all sides.
"Everyone determined," he told Cicely. "Secretly delighted with the privilege of holding up Hitler. Certain of beating him-a certainty which no amount of bombing can weaken... Maybe by the time you get this one or two more churches will be smashed up in London, some civilians killed, some personal loves and treasures wrecked-but it means nothing. A curious kind of unselfishness is developing which can stand all that and more. We have found ourselves on the right side and on the right track at last!"
Jennings' harsh view of unpatriotic intellectuals will sound familiar-in spirit, if not in diction -to anyone who has read George Orwell fulminating against parlour Marxists in his essays, and it is no surprise that this same letter includes a warm recommendation of Orwell's essay "The Lion and the Unicorn." History has been kinder to Orwell than to Jennings, who, revered though he is by a loose fraternity of historians, critics and directors, has been all but forgotten by the general public. It is a sad case of cultural amnesia. Jennings' films are not only wonderful in their own right; they are also a useful complement to Orwell's idiosyncratic ruminations on the state of England and the English.
To be sure, they were artists not merely in different media but of very different temperaments: Jennings' most typical note being a kind of eccentric lyricism, Orwell's a kind of angry disgust. Yet they also had a great many similarities. Born within a few years of each other (Orwell 1903, Jennings 1907), into much the same lower-upper-middle-class world, both men were strongly attached to the rural world of the Suffolk coast; both were steeped in English literature; both were on the left but stayed out of the Communist party (though Jennings formed close friendships with some of the communist miners he met in Wales); both were stubborn, difficult perfectionists; and both thought long and hard about the character of their native land.
There are clear similarities between some of their works. Jennings' first distinctive film as a director, Spare Time (1939), echoes Orwell not merely in being an investigative journey to the industrial north but also in its fascination with popular culture. Orwell wrote pioneering essays on boys' comics and dirty postcards; Jennings was the first to depict the curiously exotic proletarian pleasures of marching kazoo bands, all-in wrestling and the football pools. Jennings made Spare Time in the wake of his involvement with Mass-Observation, the domestic anthropology project he had co-founded in 1937 with Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson. This had been a complex and often conflict-ridden enterprise, but it was distinctly Orwellian in its ambition to see and record at first hand what the British working classes were doing and thinking. If neither Jennings nor Orwell are wholly reliable on the subject of working-class experience, at least they, unlike most of their fellow intellectuals, had made the effort to find out something about it.
But the deepest affinity between the two men is the one indicated in Jennings' letter to New York: they were both intellectuals who were not shy about being patriots. The curious story of why it was that (as Orwell once sourly exaggerated) a British intellectual would sooner be caught stealing from a poor box than standing for the national anthem, has been told in many ways. There is the international version, which dates the birth of the modern intellectual to the Dreyfus affair, and states that intellectuals are, more or less by definition, in disloyal opposition to modern nation states. There is also the local British version, which looks to the wave of guilty pacifism among those bright young men who had narrowly missed being called up and slaughtered in the first world war. Why, then, were Orwell and Jennings able to stand free of the orthodoxy?
The simplest answer, and the truest, is that they were highly independent-minded-not to say bloody-minded-individualists, who would sooner spend their lives shouting uncomfortable truths than toeing the line. Yet it's also possible to see Jennings growing into his mature patriotism. After all, this was the same man who had outraged readers of the Daily Mail by exhibiting an insulting collage about Lord Kitchener at the International Surrealist Exhibition. His change of heart came partly from his support for a war which put Britain "on the right track at last," and partly as a response to his work as a director for the Crown Film Unit. In a way, his job was simple. He had to produce various kinds of propaganda: to show America that, contrary to Dr Goebbels' reports, London Can Take It; to explain why the war was worth fighting despite all the death and horror; and to show the British that, whether they knew it or not, they were heroic.
As with much of the wartime propaganda effort, it could have gone horribly wrong, like the unpopular poster campaigns, which re-inflamed the class antagonisms that the war had begun to ease. Officials in charge of screening propaganda films in factories and barracks recall how audiences would boo and heckle anything that seemed like flannel or humbug. But the likes of Listen to Britain were met with applause, tears and other signs of grateful recognition. Critics have sometimes complained that Jennings' view of the British in these years is hopelessly idealised; spectators at the time did not agree.
Jennings succeeded where other propagandists failed because of his authenticity and because he managed to capture a quality in Britain at war that many people could intuit but few could articulate-it is why we call his films "poetic." His letters from the war years show him growing in respect and affection for the people he was working with on a daily basis-miners, housewives, firemen, canteen girls-and there is a sense in which the "patriotism" of these films is nothing other than that respectful affection writ large. Admiring these people, Jennings cannot but admire the nation made up of these people. No less importantly, his affection was reciprocated. When Jennings gave his film The Silent Village its world premiere in the South Wales community where he had made it, the result was, he wrote, "blindingly moving," because the families saw that he had portrayed them as they were and not betrayed their trust. "It was the greatest ratification of hopes and promises to have their acceptance of the thing," he wrote to a friend on the Daily Worker. "I wonder if they realise what that means to one of the artist tribe-so long, all of us, in ivory towers." The sense of "alienation" which had so often been the intellectual's badge of pride was, Jennings saw, not so much an outworn luxury as an affliction.
His final film of the war years, A Diary for Timothy, is disconcertingly melancholy, full of anxiety about whether the post-war world would build on the social lessons of the war years or, as EM Forster's commentary bleakly puts it, the lust for greed and power would once again drive out decency. None of Jennings' post-war films has anything like the power of his best work, and the patriotism of his last films is either sweetly elegaic or faintly picture-postcard. It is as if Jennings needed the war to stir him to greatness.
There is a temptation here to feel nostalgic for the second world war because it brought out the best in people. Jennings would never have been so confused. The qualities he saw in Wales-"honesty, culture, manners, practical socialism"-had not been called up overnight by the approach of Hitler's armies. They were the products of long growth and the forgotten efforts of countless anonymous souls.
Jennings had been thinking about the relationship between art and the public long before he went near a film camera. Ever since studying literature at Cambridge, he had been preoccupied with certain questions about poetry: about the role of the Poet Laureate, for instance. In the late 1930s, Jennings made a series of radio broadcasts popularising his thoughts. It was the job of the Poet Laureate, he said, to explain to the nation who they are: "Now he can't tell the community who they are unless he talks about the things the community knows about, the things that they're interested in, and unless he also looks on the community's past-at the figures, the monuments, the achievements, the defeats, or whatever it may be, that have made the community what it is."
Jennings was the cinematic Poet Laureate of Britain at war; his films from that time will always be important as a vivid, humane and unexpectedly beautiful record of perhaps the most far-reaching of all the episodes which made modern Britain "what it is." They are, perhaps, even more valuable for their glimpses of what Britain has been and might be. Far better informed than most of his contemporaries about the reality of life in Britain, Jennings none the less could see that Britain's human riches gave promise of a very different country-a country where, as Orwell had it, the sniggering aesthete was a figure as outmoded and useless as a cavalry colonel, and even the most scrupulous of intellectuals need have no fear of feeling patriotic.
