...all England seemed to have decided to forget that it had lost everything, and to live philosophically from day to day upon the Dole provided by the United States.
If an aristocratic society suddenly drops to pieces, after many centuries, and if a mercantile class of enormous power and wealth drops to pieces at the same time, there is inevitably a scene of universal wreckage and decay, as when demolition work is in progress.This wreckage is the result of two World Wars and the socialist government which has taken over in their aftermath to levy ruinous taxes and provide handouts which sap the work ethic. But Lewis doesn't in his Foreword necessarily blame the current government's politicians and supporters personally for the disaster; rather, the current state of the English people--"shabby, ill-fed, loaded with debt"--is "the fault of everybody or of nobody...let us recognize that the sole explanation of this is our collective stupidity."
Socialism is merely the name of something which is happening to us, something which could not otherwise than happen, in view of all historical factors present, above all the proliferation of mechanical techniques.
Lewis argues that socialism is the inevitable development of nineteenth-century liberalism, which was itself an outgrowth of Christianity, and that religion is required for socialism to function at all--without some kind of "supernatural sanction," almost nobody would even consider willingly give up his goods to help his "less fortunate fellows."
...a long process of religious conditioning...has led us to a point at which we empower the State to deprive us of practically everything. This is the work of Jesus.
...look upon the politician as it is best to look upon a war, as a visitation of the Fiend.The main text of Rotting Hill is over 300 pages long and consists of nine stories, followed by an "Envoi." These stories illustrate and dramatize the ideas Lewis states in the Foreword, and related ideas, and largely consist of people arguing about socialism or suffering poor service, bad food, shoddy consumer products and the like, though there are some human interest plots: in Chapter 1 a guy loses his job; in Chapter 5 a guy wants to marry a woman he's been in love with for 20 or 30 years and suddenly realizes they are incompatible; in Chapter 4 a guy who pursues fame gets out of the spotlight and decides to change his way of living (or maybe is just exchanging one artificial persona for another.)
The narrator of this chapter, and most of the stories in the book, is a version of Lewis himself; an artist and writer who spends time in the Reading Room of the British Museum reading serious books, meets with ministers of Parliament, is the frequent recipient of letters from people who want to interview him, and sells his paintings and drawings. This first chapter is a sort of character study of a guy whom Lewis meets for the first time in the B. M. Reading Room and who sort of forces his friendship upon an initially reluctant Lewis and buys one of Lewis's drawings ("a large, strongly coloured gouache of a number of nude horsemen") even though he cannot afford it.
This guy, Samuel Hartley Rymer, is a rural clergyman with a beautiful wife, and Lewis uses him to illustrate and dramatize the kinds of arguments he makes in the Foreword about the rot which has set in in England: English people have abandoned formal religion and the Church of England is in terminal decline; socialism is a descendent of Christianity that, while a development of 19th-century liberalism, can't make any improvements on that liberalism's material achievements and instead by imposing all kinds of taxes and regulations is diminishing people's freedoms.
Rymer is an ambiguous character, a mix of positive and negative attributes, an irritating know-it-all full of dumb ideas based on ignorance, but also a sort of pathetic victim of social changes which keep him from making use of his admirable qualities--Lewis suggests he is at once both a clown and a man capable of heroism. Relatively few of the story's page count is devoted to plot; Lewis describes Rymer and his milieu and then he and the clergyman have conversations in which Rymer expresses his unwavering support for the socialist government (he dismisses all complaints of shortages and rationing) and his sympathy for the Soviet Union (Rymer thinks Britain should stop trading with the United States and instead embrace a relationship with the USSR as well as save money by disbanding the, to him, unnecessary British military establishment.)
The plot of this story, such as it is, concerns Rymer's position as head of the local church. The most prominent local farmer fears Rymer threatens his livelihood by indoctrinating his workers with leftist ideas and so seeks to have Rymer sent off by the Church authorities, but the Bishop and Archdeacon don't see anything wrong with Rymer and he maintains his position for a decade. But then the farmer starts a fight with Rymer in a pub, and, ironically, the workers whose rights Rymer was always championing side with their boss, corroborating his bogus allegations that Rymer was the aggressor and had been drinking, even though Rymer never threw a punch and doesn't drink. The Church authorities have no choice but to transfer Rymer.
At 76 pages, this is the longest portion of Rotting Hill.
"2: My Fellow Traveller to Oxford"
Lewis on a train meets a 30-something university student whose class he is not initially able to determine:
What a man wears is no longer, in England, any indication of his economic status. It is not a classless society yet, but it is a uniformly shabby one.
Spurred by a Unesco book of essays on the topic of Human Rights, the travelers discuss the difference between the political rights the English tradition has always emphasized, like freedom of speech and freedom of movement, and the new economic and social rights which the Soviet government has emphasized, basically the right to various handouts. A major theme of the discussion is fear of a war between the West and the Communist East; while Lewis suggests such a war would be imperialist and not ideological because Britain under the Labour government and America under the Democratic Party are moving in a collectivist direction and offering plenty of the novel economic and social rights and maybe the USSR will eventually develop political rights, the student scoffs at the idea of the development of political freedoms in the Soviet Union, saying that bourgeois liberalism is just a scam that affords capital the means of exploiting labor and that the people of the USSR have no interest whatsoever in so-called political rights.
"3: The Rot"
Lewis tells us that post-war London is plagued with dry rot due to so many buildings having been untenanted during the war; he also theorizes that the fungus that is the rot propagates in the ruins of houses hit by German bombs. His apartment suffers the rot, and this chapter describes the months-long work of replacing the rotten wood in the Lewis apartment. The operation takes a long time partly because of the rationing of wood, a problem exacerbated by the fact that, according to Lewis, the socialist government is hostile to London and prioritizes Northern industrial towns when distributing supplies. Another reason for the slow progress of the repairs is that the workers, buoyed by the collapse of the upper and middle classes and the triumph of socialism at the elections, goof off most of the day instead of working and actively resent Lewis and other educated and/or wealthy people and intentionally try to annoy them by making noise and inconveniencing them.
This is a story told in the third-person, Lewis not appearing.
Paul Eldred is a successful historian, one of the most prominent of his generation, a guy with many admirers among the educated who is always giving talks. He is something of a phony who pretend to hate attention and to resent receiving mail, getting phone calls, and having visitors, when in fact just the opposite is the case--he relishes all such evidence of his fame and the admiration of others. Eldred self-consciously has taken Samuel Johnson as his model, and is always sort of putting on an act, endeavouring to appear a great man.
Eldred needs some dental work done, and the first part of this story includes loads of dialogue in which Eldred and friends gripe about the recent government take over of the medical system, which they think has introduced inefficiencies and corruption ("jobs for the boys"); Eldred's primary physician tells how a hospital used to have a single clerk and all the paperwork got done on time, but now that the government is running the hospital it has fifteen clerks and the paperwork is always behind. Eldred opines that this is a spoils system, designed to build an army of voters reliant on and loyal to the government, and asserts the same thing was done by the Roosevelt administration in America.
Eldred retires for a few days to a Catholic nursing home to have his dental work done, and finds that the isolation--he doesn't even read books or the newspaper!--does him good; not feeling the need to put on his great man act means he can relax. There is a potentially dangerous complication in his procedure, and he ends up staying in the nursing home over two weeks; he becomes fascinated by the nuns, even considering writing a history of their order, even considering becoming a monk! When he finally returns to his old life he is a changed man; he has replaced the statue of Buddha in his office with an engraving of a Madonna, and taken up the "abstractedness" and mannerisms of some of the nuns at the nursing home. But is this a legitimate change of character, or just another bogus persona he has taken up in place of his earlier one?
"5: Time the Tiger"
This is another tale told in the third-person omniscient, and the most conventionally entertaining portion of Rotting Hill. It has an actual plot, and, is strengthened by the fact that, in addition to banging away at the book's pervasive and particular theme of how terrible socialism is, it offers the reader the interesting and related subtheme of how intrusive politics damages friendships, as well as the unrelated but quite universal theme of how sexual relationships (or the pursuit thereof) can damage friendships.
Mark and Charles are middle-class men in their forties who have been friends for two decades or more. Mark, son of a doctor, lives in London and is working at the Ministry of Education; Charles, son of a lawyer, is a country farmer who sells his goods on the black market. Charles is staying with Mark for a few days because he has an appointment with an eye doctor in town.
Throughout the story the two men, sometimes together and sometimes individually, face a myriad of problems with services and goods--food is bad, the doctor's office is dirty, clothing is shoddy, bifocal spectacles are in short supply, etc. Socialist Mark always blames the greed of capital and the toxicity of the profit motive, while Charles blames the socialist government's taxes and regulations. There is quite a bit of business about which of the two men is the real rebel, why Mark became a socialist, how the postwar reforms have radically altered the life of gentry types like Charles' family, etc.
Much of the story's text is taken up with their arguments about the government and socialism. A change of pace, however, is provided by themes related to the passing of time. The two friends see a French film called Time the Tiger and this phrase and the idea that time is a monster that devours people is a sort of recurring motif of the chapter. The three main characters of the story are sort of living in the past, seeing themselves as people of the Twenties. Mark and Charles speak at some length about the way the 20th century has seen radical change in just a short period of time, what with the airplane, automobile, telephone, radio, television and atomic weapons revolutionizing everybody's lives in just five decades.
As for the plot, it revolves around the fact that Mark has been in love with Charles's sister Ida forever, but never made a move on her, and has not seen her for ten years, since before the war. She married some other guy, but he got killed in a horse riding accident; Lewis seems to imply that Ida is no prize, and one of the ways he does so is by suggesting she manipulated that poor bastard, who was no horseman, into taking up riding because it is what people of her class do. The climax of "Time the Tiger" is the lunch where Mark meets Ida again. For a while the three reminisce happily about their lives in the 1920s, and Mark thinks he will marry Ida, who has not yet lost her looks, but then Ida reveals herself to be a ferocious fire-breathing Conservative, calling Aneurin Bevan "a filthy little man" and declaring that the "ex-dock labourers, asiatics and corporation lawyers" who are running the country are "traitors" who should be hanged. This lunch not only sees Mark's dreams of marriage to Ida dashed, but destroys his long friendship with Charles.
After Charles returns to the country, Mark decides to marry a woman he knows, "a good party-woman, with a pretty face." (This guy has evolved into a pinko, but he isn't a feminist yet and so still judges women by their looks.)
"6: Mr. Patrick's Toy Shop"
Lewis returns as narrator for this story, which is a character study of Patrick, a Yorkshireman who, after service in the army as an engineer, has lived and run a store in London for seventeen years. This guy has contempt for his adopted city, saying that Londoners are all "spivs" who produce nothing of value. Patrick is a cunning businessman but also a stalwart supporter of the Labour Party and has a good-natured recognition of his own hypocrisy.
There is no plot to this one, but a lot of theories as to why the English manufactured goods of 1949 are so poor.
"7: The Talking Shop"
This 14-page section is more like an op-ed than a story, with neither plot nor character. Lewis describes the inside of Parliament from the point of view of a visitor, and tells us that the Tories are not going to turn back the clock on socialism, that they are just stooges for the leftists and themselves recognize that the conditions of the world make absolutist power inevitable; Lewis also argues that if somebody blew up Parliament, massacring the ministers, it wouldn't matter because Parliament is no longer really running the country, it is just a rubber-stamp machine.
Mr. Churchill, landscape-painter and war-historian, too old for active leadership, is the very perfect symbol for this token-Opposition.
Rightists as much as leftists would acquire as much power as Stalin tomorrow if that were feasible--all were absolutists under their skins...."8: My Disciple"
Lewis tells us he receives many letters from people who want to meet him, but throws most away unread, and in this story relates how he made an exception, agreeing to meet a guy whose letter came from an address in an unfashionable neighborhood. This guy turns out to be a former professional soldier (a serjeant) who served in India for seventeen years and then, upon returning to England, took advantage of a grant from the Labour government to become an art teacher in a school for poor kids. He can't paint or sculpt himself, and isn't interested in actually teaching, and gives the kids no direction, encouraging them to paint on the walls of the classroom, and sculpt whatever they want in plasticine--given free rein, the kids sculpt penises and tell adults they are lighthouses. Sarge insists that true art is "spontaneous" and "innocent" and tells Lewis that his calling is to encourage in people an enthusiasm for art.
Sarge has come calling on Lewis because he has read Lewis's books and found them stimulating and wants some advice from the man himself. Sarge has gotten a job at a new college as art-director, and seeks Lewis's advice on how to "make engineers art-conscious" and inspire enthusiasm in them. Sarge doesn't want to make the students draw models or any old-fashioned thing like that. Lewis doesn't have any advice.
As he does with the other clownish figures in this book, Lewis expresses sympathy as well contempt for this guy--the art world is full of parasites and scammers, and Lewis prefers the hard-scrabbling Sarge to higher-class, better-educated charlatans.
"9: Parents and Horses"
This final numbered chapter comes across as a piece of journalism, with interviews and lots of quotes from documents. I thought maybe Lewis had Ezra Pound in mind when he was writing this one, as usury, one of Pound's bugbears, and the Social Credit theory, one of Pound's hobby horses, appear prominently in this story.
Lewis goes to a country village and laments that farms nowadays lack horses, everything being done by machine. He has left London to interview a clergyman who is illegally running a school for kids under ten--the government has decreed that rural schools be centralized and all rural kids be transported some miles from their villages to schools run by government experts, schools which are quite unaccountable to parents or teachers. Many villagers see this as an attack on the traditional family structure and likely to cause the village to wither away, and when Lewis comes by to do his reporting the villagers are working together under the leadership of the vicar to resist and run their own "Parents' School." Not long after, however, the exhausted volunteers abandon this quixotic effort and the Parents' School is dissolved.
One of the themes of this chapter is how the socialists of 1949 fetishize industry, perhaps taking a cue from the USSR, where "industry was made into a power-god," and seek to turn everything, from farms to schools, into factories. Lewis suggests that, the same way that horses are seen as an obsolete component of agriculture, that parents are seen in the new socialist Britain as an obsolete component of education, an actual obstacle to good pedagogical practice.
Lewis ends the chapter with his theories on why religion is in collapse in England, suggesting that the Church of England is too open-minded, that an institution which permits such diversity among its clergy that some clergymen are outspoken Marxists and others are actual papists lacks the rigidity needed to survive long term.
"Envoi: The Rot Camp"
In this brief and somewhat surreal episode Lewis takes a walk in his neighborhood, going to pubs and the reading room and a shooting gallery, meeting silly characters everywhere he goes. Lewis tells a conservative that the Tory party is no better than the Labour party, that the State is a monster that reflects the true nature of its citizens. He visits a fortune teller, a shooting gallery, and gives change to an old beggar woman who represents the worn out and emaciated Britannia, her trident a crutch.
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