Nostalgia for the Moon Under Water
Orwell's essay was not a general celebration of British pub culture: it was a piece of wartime longing for a pre-war Britain that never came back.
At least half of the interesting ideas in this post are due to Rachel Park, whereas the inane and incorrect ones are my responsibility entirely. The photo attached to this post is of my personal ideal pub, the Live and Let Live in Cambridge.
George Orwell is a harder writer than he is often given credit for. I don’t mean that his prose is obscure or difficult to understand: clarity was one of Orwell’s great literary virtues. But the fact that Orwell was clear about the literal meaning of his arguments has not made it any easier for interpreters to get to grips with the deeper texture of his thinking.
Instead, all too often we are served up a rather simple Orwell: a beacon of British sensibleness, defender of freedom, and teller of difficult truths against ideologues on both the right and the left—in short, a man who was for good things and against bad ones.1 This reading is comforting, but it struggles to make sense of so much of Orwell’s thought: the depth of his social conservatism, his unwavering commitment to socialism above any other political value, his national allegiance to England (rather than Britain), and so on. Yet the comforting interpretation is the one that’s on offer from many otherwise-incisive and intelligent critics.2
To me, this suggests two things. One, that Orwell’s ideas are in fact quite difficult, not easy to get a handle on, and in need of careful interpretation and contextualisation; and two, that Orwell’s simple and clear prose can beguile readers, causing them to miss the complexity of the underlying thoughts. We have here the opposite of a phenomenon that Orwell himself once wrote about, the connection between literary style and political stance: ‘One knows, for instance, that a Socialist would not write like Chesterton or a Tory imperialist like Bernard Shaw, though how one knows it is not easy to say.’3 The problem with Orwell is that many readers ‘know’ that only a sound man with sensible opinions could write like him: so quietly authoritative, able to carry the reader along with him with ease. And so they interpret Orwell in terms of the opinions that seem sensible to them, emphasising the bits that they like and quietly downplaying others.4
The flipside of all this is that even the most seemingly-shallow of Orwell’s writings can have underexplored depths. You just need to equip yourself with the determination to pay attention to puzzling details, down to a single word that isn’t what you would have predicted, and to be on your guard: it is all too tempting, under the influence of Orwell’s overall style, to elide the sharp edges and unfamiliar choices in his sentences.
This applies outside of Orwell’s explicitly political or literary essays. A great example is ‘The Moon Under Water’, Orwell’s ode to his (fictional) ideal pub, published as the Evening Standard’s Saturday Essay on 9th February 1946. It’s become a well-known celebration of the British pub and its culture, lending its title to celebrations of the institution ranging from books to podcasts, not to mention more than a few pubs—Spoons chairman Tim Martin is a fan. It gets remixed relatively regularly: for one recent example, fellow Substacker
recently wrote an homage to Orwell’s essay where the subject was instead the ideal bookshop.The short essay takes the form of a list: ten features of Orwell’s dream pub, the titular Moon Under Water, together with Orwell’s wish that real pubs could be more like it.5 Some of Orwell’s desiderata are eminently sensible—the Moon Under Water serves his favourite type of beer (creamy draught stout), ’is always quiet enough to talk’, and overall has a good ‘atmosphere’. And other aspects of the essay were, if anything, ahead of their time: ‘I think that the garden is its best feature, because it allows whole families to go there instead of Mum having to stay at home and mind the baby while Dad goes out alone.’ But when you examine the list more closely, parts of it begin to jar a little.
Consider Orwell’s description of the pub’s layout:
There are a public bar, a saloon bar, a ladies’ bar, a bottle-and-jug for those who are too bashful to buy their supper beer publicly, and, upstairs, a dining-room.
A pub divided into distinct bars is a rarity nowadays, and of course the ‘ladies’ bar’ has gone the way of the dodo. What draws my eye especially is the Moon Under Water’s ‘bottle-and-jug’—the equivalent of the attached off-license, where (as the name suggests) you’d buy booze in bottles and jugs to take away—and its customers. Who exactly is drinking ‘supper beer’ regularly, and yet is ‘too bashful to buy [it] publicly’?
What jumps out even more, though, is Orwell’s description of the snacks available at the pub:
You cannot get dinner at the Moon Under Water, but there is always the snack counter where you can get liver-sausage sandwiches, mussels (a speciality of the house), cheese, pickles and those large biscuits with caraway seeds in them which only seem to exist in public-houses.
Linger on this paragraph a while, and ask yourself some questions. How often do you eat liver sausage, whether in a sandwich or on its own? What pub (even on the coast) serves mussels as a snack, as opposed to a full meal? And have you ever even seen caraway seed biscuits?6
You can maybe chalk all this up to Orwell expressing his own peculiar tastes. (Certainly, his preference for beer served in china mugs was not widespread!) But if Orwell’s ‘ten qualities of a good pub’ reflect nothing more than his own weirdness, this reduces the status of ‘The Moon Under Water’ from a valuable meditation on the British pub to an eccentric’s personal wish-list. (At which point, what was the point of writing it and putting it in a public newspaper?)
So it’s more common to instead chalk the unusual aspects of the Moon Under Water up to the fashions of the past. ‘Perhaps today crisps are in and caraway seed biscuits are out,’ the thought goes, ‘but the fundamentals of a good pub—beer, conversation, atmosphere—are timeless, and Orwell captured them beautifully.’ There’s a lot to this, but this argument has the same tendency discussed above: flattening the strange parts of Orwell’s writings, better as to laud him for being right. We should indeed understand the oddities in ‘The Moon Under Water’ in terms of Orwell’s time and context—but we should focus on that context, instead of brushing it aside as an irrelevant distraction from the ‘fundamental truth’ about the British pub.
An indication of the relevant context can be seen in one of Orwell’s reviews from a few years earlier, where he discussed the Mass-Observation study The Pub and the People.7 This study has become one of the great quiet influences on British thinking about the pub as an institution, turning away from the implicit puritanism of studies focussed on ‘the drink problem’ and instead focussing on recording the attitudes of ordinary drinkers in Bolton in fantastic detail. The study was conducted in the late 1930s, but published in 1943, and the opening to Orwell’s review from that year gives us a great sense of his priorities at the time:
It is a pity that this large and careful survey could not have had a short appendix indicating what effect the war has had on our drinking habits. It seems to have been compiled just before the war, and even in that short period of time beer has doubled in price and been heavily diluted.
The rest of the review is complimentary, but the suddenness and brusqueness with which Orwell begins tells us that the wartime context was the dominant influence on his thinking about British pubs and their culture. By the time ‘The Moon Under Water’ was published in 1946, the war itself was over, but the war economy—defined by rationing and by the redirection of resources and industry away from consumer demands—was very much still going; if anything, it was intensifying under Attlee’s Labour government. Living standards and consumer culture largely stagnated until the 1950s, when economic controls and rationing were relaxed. In their study, the Mass-Observers had declared that ‘the pub as a cultural institution is at present declining’, and Orwell (with no little sadness) agreed; while the war was not the only cause, it was certainly accelerating the decline.
‘The Moon Under Water’ was therefore much more than a description of a dream pub: it was calling back to the British pub as it had been before the war, and as Orwell hoped it could be again. The strangeness of the essay is largely explained by the fact that, while it was published in the post-war era, its true context was the pre-war era (or rather, Orwell’s memories of that era).
Think of the man Orwell describes who is ‘too bashful’ to buy beer publicly. He cuts a rather odd figure in a post-war British context. But he makes more sense when you read Orwell’s review of the Mass-Observation study, and see his concerns about publicans facing ‘persecution by Nonconformist Town Councils’ and the not-entirely-vanished influence of ‘Temperance fanatics’. Depending on where you lived, buying beer publicly in the 1920s and 1930s came with the lingering risk of an abstaining neighbour seeing—and judging—you. And so, while the disappearance of Temperance from Britain was almost complete by 1946, some patrons of the Moon Under Water were still worried about buying beer in places where their neighbours might see: the pub did not merely exist in Orwell’s mind, but in a part of Orwell’s mind that was permanently fixed in the late 1920s or early 1930s.
The snacks on offer tell the same story. Rationing was in place for more than a decade in Britain—much longer than in any other country, and indeed much longer than the war itself—and it led to radical changes in British tastes and cooking habits. (A few key examples are discussed here.) Caraway seed biscuits and liver sausage are not merely old snacks, they are very specifically pre-war snacks.8 By the time Orwell was writing, they were decisively on their way out, not just from pubs but from British life as a whole.
Even Orwell’s odd predilection for beer served in china mugs is explained in terms of a calling-back to an earlier age: ‘China mugs,’ he tells us, ‘went out about 30 years ago’. This is all to say that ‘The Moon Under Water’ is not (just) a celebration of the pub, but specifically a bit of nostalgia. Its criteria for good pubs are defined by the author’s memories of what good pubs were like ten to twenty years before it was written, when he was a young man. The essay celebrates an institution that Orwell thought was on the decline, hastened by a combination of the war, higher beer prices, and ‘the whole trend of the age … away from creative communal amusements and towards solitary mechanical ones.’
Now, when it comes to journalists pronouncing death, the British pub is a lot like Mark Twain. Orwell and the Mass-Observers were both wrong that the pub was inexorably declining; despite many difficulties, it has survived to this day, and in relatively good health. This is, of course, something that deserves to be celebrated. But it is surprising that people so often choose to celebrate it using Orwell’s essay, which is an essentially nostalgic piece premised on the assumption that the pub is in decline, and which (as a result) uses the pubs of the past—down to their snacks, their customers’ attitudes, and their crockery—as the yardstick by which modern pubs should be measured.
Or perhaps it’s not surprising after all. It’s just another instance of the general phenomenon of Orwell interpretation: his difficult edges sanded off so the reader can present him as the essential truth-teller of his age, who managed to always be right (meaning no more and no less than this: his sanded-down opinions always agree with the reader’s). ‘The Moon Under Water’ is presented not as an essay with specific definitive content, some of which is quite weird, but as a timeless piece containing a deep truth about the goodness of good pubs and the badness of bad ones.
There’s a place for platitudes, of course. But when we read ‘The Moon Under Water’ with our critical guard up, we can see something more interesting: a detailed and arresting illustration of just how much, and yet just how little, the war changed the texture of everyday life in the UK; and an example of how powerful the temptation to nostalgia is, even for an incredibly forward-looking writer, and even when—especially when—he may not have even realised he was falling for it.
Robert Conquest’s somewhat inane poem simply titled ‘George Orwell’ is a great example:
Moral and mental glaciers melting slightly
Betray the influence of his warm intent.
Because he taught us what the actual meant
The vicious winter grips its prey less tightly.Not all were grateful for his help, one finds,
For how they hated him, who huddled with
The comfort of a quick remedial myth
Against the cold world and their colder minds.We die of words. For touchstones he restored
The real person, real event or thing;
—And thus we see not war but suffering
As the conjunction to be most abhorred.He shared with a great world, for greater ends,
That honesty, a curious cunning virtue
You share with just the few who don’t desert you.
A dozen writers, a half-a-dozen friends.A moral genius. And truth-seeking brings
Sometimes a silliness we view askance,
Like Darwin playing his bassoon to plants;
He too had lapses, but he claimed no wingsWhile those who drown a truth’s empiric part
In dithyramb or dogma turn frenetic;
—Than whom no writer could be less poetic
He left this lesson for all verse, all art.
(If you like this, de gustibus non est disputandum: my dislike probably just comes down to the fact that I have no time for Larkinism of any kind, in poetry and in jazz. Conquest was a Larkinist if he was anything.)
The archetypal example is Christopher Hitchens’ Orwell’s Victory.
Orwell, review of The Development of William Butler Yeats, by V. K. Narayana Menon, Horizon January 1943.
Louis Menand got it exactly correct in one of the few unambiguously excellent essays ever written about Orwell: ‘Orwell's prose was so effective that it seduced many readers into imagining, mistakenly, that he was saying what they wanted him to say, and what they themselves thought.’ Stefan Collini also gets at some of this in his recent Oxford edition of selected Orwell essays, writing that in Orwell ‘we are being seduced and persuaded even when we think we are straightforwardly giving intellectual assent to a bare propositional logic… Part of Orwell’s writerly achievement in these essays is to convince us that little writerly artifice is involved.’
Nonetheless, Collini’s own readings of Orwell give far too much emphasis to the ‘voice’ at the expense of the ‘argument’. His understanding of the structure of Orwell’s ideas, rather than his rhetoric, is hardly subtler than Hitchens’ (note 2): for example, after the first paragraph of Collini’s introduction, he uses the word ‘socialist’ only once, and not to describe Orwell.
You also sometimes get the inverse of the unapologetic sermon about Orwell’s virtues: the rabid anti-Orwell screed. Often this comes from communists, or those at least sympathetic, turned off by Orwell’s own rabid anti-communism. They typically accuse Orwell of cynical deception, of using socialist language as a cover for his real reactionary beliefs. It’s important to see that the unspoken assumption is still that an author could only truthfully write like Orwell wrote if he was sensible and right-on; the only difference is that, convinced that Orwell was not in fact right-on, these anti-Orwellites conclude that he was untruthful, just another cynical and dishonest ‘snitch’.
Like the original Ten Commandments, Orwell’s Ten Pub Commandments did not come numbered and run into each other somewhat; it’s not obvious how you should count them so as to get exactly ten.
Oddly enough, a piece appeared in the Spectator earlier this year about caraway seed biscuits. This is essentially the only recent mention I can find of them outside of historical blogs and the like. Notably, the author last ate one sixty years ago, and only because he was being fed them by his grandmother, whose tastes and cooking (/ baking) habits were presumably formed in the pre-war era. This is a bit of a key for understanding the biscuits’ role in ‘The Moon Under Water’, as I say below.
Orwell, review of The Pub and the People, The Listener 21 January 1943.
In fact, a caraway seed dessert (a cake rather than a biscuit, but that is only to be expected given what Orwell said about the biscuits being exclusive to pubs) can be found in the bible of interwar cooking, Arabella Boxer’s Book of English Food. The introduction to this cookbook is a valuable discussion of how much rationing changed the country’s cuisine, but just as valuable is flicking through its pages and seeing how alien the interwar recipes seem.
An excellent look at this classic essay. A few more things strike me about Orwell's ode to the Moon Under Water:
- “If you are asked why you favour a particular public-house, it would seem natural to put the beer first, but the thing that most appeals to me about the Moon Under Water is what people call its ‘atmosphere’.” It wouldn't be at all natural these days: I would say that the vast majority of people go to pubs for the atmosphere, not the beer.
- In southern Germany, lots of draught drinks are traditionally served in china mugs, be that beer in Munich or Viez (apple wine) in the Trier area.
- “Games are only played in the public, so that in the other bars you can walk about without constantly ducking to avoid flying darts.” I can only imagine most pubs were incredibly rowdy! No wonder Mother stays home.