Under Thirty Page
THE USE OF LEISURE II
By WALTER ALLEN
[The writer, aged 27, is a graduate of Birmingham University, a3d has been a Scho3lm2ster, Lecturer and Novelist] IT can only have been in recent years that leisure became a problem. Ours is perhaps an abnormally self-con- sdous age, and the catch-phrase, " problem of leisure," has a self-conscious tang about it. Stripped of the jargon, it means, I suppose, first, How shall we fill up the eight hours that most of us have at our disposal when we are neither working nor sleeping ? and secondly, How can we fill up that time to the best advantage to ourselves ?
It may be doubted whether a farm labourer, digging his garden after the day's work and gossiping or playing darts over 'a pint in the local pub, would understand these questions. He would know very well how to spend his leisure. And inasmuch as we are usually thinking of sombody else's leisure rather than our own when we discuss the problem, the whole discussion is infected with a certain amount of snobbery. To linger over a drink in a café in Paris is account- ed civilised behaviour ; but there are always plenty of people to revile a working man drinking beer in a pub. To patronise the ballet is not only a sign of culture, but fashionable ; to be one of a forty thousand crowd at a football match is often to be stigmatised as degenerate by a publicising parson ; though in point of fact first-class football is a highly- developed art-form, and football fans certainly talk no more nonsense than balletomanes.
This problem of leisure, especially when it is the leisure of the working class that is being discussed, is one that offers a field-day for well-meaning people who would forcibly foist cocoa and uplift on the workers, particularly now that two millions must suffer more or less permanently the enforced leisure of unemployment. No writer has described more terrifyingly what leisure means to a considerable section of the urbanised proletariat than the American novelist James Farrell, in his Studs Lonigan trilogy. Lonigan is a house-painter in Chicago, a would-be " tough-guy," and his life outside his work is composed exclusively of fantasies of sex and power and evenings spent in bars, pool- halls, brothels, burlesque-shows and cinemas. His, as Farrell, who is a moralist, is careful to imply, is a wasted life ; but it is one almost inevitable for Lonigan, given his sur- roundings and upbringing. Nobody knowing urban America can deny the essential truth of Farrell's picture ; but, differ- ences of custom and nationality taken into account, the picture remains true for a large section of the lumpenpro- letariat of our own great cities.
We are now faced in this country -with something that appears to be unparalleled in the history of civilisation. We have abolished illiteracy ; and are faced with the fact that probably three-quarters of our population are living— and living without knowing their loss—without art, without any of those things that civilised people believe are good in themselves. For three-quarters of our population litera- ture is represented by the Daily Mirror, Everybody's Weekly and the American " dime " magazines that Woolworth's sell, music by In a Monastery Garden and Little Old Lady, and a French cuisine by twopennyworth of fish and chips or a can of salmon. In other words, leisure for the bulk of our people means passively imbibing some form of dope ; whether it is in the form of football pools, Sunday news- papers, Radio Luxemburg, or the cinema, or all of these, makes little difference. The exploitation of the leisure of the masses has become one of our greatest industries.
It has become so all-pervasive that, if the end of leisure is the fulfilment of one's individuality, then it is now all but impossible for anybody born into a family with a weekly wage of less than £3 los. even to begin to fulfil his indi- viduality. He is caught from the moment of his birth, born a Studs Lonigan. There are, as I know very well because I am one, exceptions ; but they are very few com- pared with the tremendous bulk of the population, and when they occur it is usually through some easily traceable influence. In my case the influence was my father, a Socialist in the tradition of Morris and Ruskin, and through these a widely-read man ; but if I had been the eldest son instead of the youngest, or if there had been ten shillings less coining into the house every week, I should now almost certainly be a clerk or a factory-hand.
Gresham's Law appears to hold good for other things besides money, and this exploitation of the leisure of the masses has its consequences. It is in the interest of the exploiters to assure the doped worker that it is better to be lowbrow than highbrow. To be branded as either is unpleasant, the one with his halo of heartiness, the other with his aura of superiority ; and the terms are unsubtle— a football fan, for instance, is a highbrow where football is concerned. But this enforced and self-conscious opposition between highbrow and lowbrow, in which the highbrow is increasingly on the defensive and so increasingly superior, means that the gulf between the arts and the masses becomes still wider and art itself the property of a tiny minority cut off from the life of the masses.
Those of us who find our leisure no problem at all, who are interested in the arts, politics, science, good talk over a meal decently cooked and served, might reflect from time to time how little credit we can claim for this. We too are the victims very largely of our early environments ; but we have been lucky in that the environment we were born into was one that made a fruitful use of leisure possible. Tradi- tional English education, with its emphasis on the humanities, has little commercial value, but at least it makes for cultured lives. It may not prevent boredom, and it may be that boredom is on the increase. But boredom when habitual is the symptom of a psychological illness that cannot be cured by learning Italian, collecting stamps, or joining amateur dramatic societies.
But the problem of proletarian leisure is radical to our society. It cannot be solved by any palliatives ; the efforts of the B.B.C. and the Workers' Educational Association can only help those who are already predisposed to be helped. Unfortunately, if one is used to drinking Red Biddy one will find champagne pretty thin stuff, and the novels of Jane Austen are a long way behind the articles in True Stories in obvious excitement. As long as the great majority of our people have to leave school and enter the factory at fourteen—and how many of us can honestly say that we would have developed at all if we had been forced to leave school at fourteen ?—conditions will remain as they are. Nor will the raising of the school age by a year or so of itself make much difference. Something much more drastic is needed.
Education and environment have given us the chance to use our leisure for self-fulfilment ; we are the heirs of the corpus of ideas and works of art that we call civilisation. Whether we make good use of that inheritance depends on ourselves. But we can ultimately only solve the problem of working-class leisure by seeing that the rest of our fellow-countrymen—the overwhelming majority of the people of England—have similar opportunities to those that we have had. And that means social revolution.
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