Orwell, Listing
George Orwell, of all
people, now stands accused of being an informant for the British secret
service. In recent weeks, the British press has been filled with articles
asking whether the inventor of Big Brother was a hypocrite for naming
names.
Revelations about Orwell's "secret list" have been trickling out for some
years. In 1991, Michael Shelden published an excellent biography that revealed
Orwell kept a notebook listing the names of people he took to be Communists or
Communist sympathizers. In 1996, the British Foreign Office disclosed that
Orwell had shared some of the names in his notebook with a Cold War-era outfit
called the Information Research Department. With the British publication last
month of Orwell's complete works, in 20 volumes, we have a more complete story
of what he did, despite the fact that the Foreign Office has yet to release the
actual list of names Orwell submitted.
Surprisingly, little of the story has been reported in the
United States. The only prominent mention was a confused quasi-defense that
appeared on the New York Times op-ed page a few weeks ago. The author,
Cold War historian Timothy Naftali, asserts that Orwell's list showed and
criticizes him for showing poor sense. The apparent point of the piece was not
to challenge his reputation but rather to argue that those who named names
before the House Un-American Activities Committee weren't so bad, since they
did only what Orwell had done in a time of difficult choices. Orwell defenders
in Britain have emphasized that in May 1949, when he shared his list, he was on
his deathbed. Some have suggested he was coaxed into cooperating by a woman he
was in love with.
None of
these excuses is necessary. What Orwell did was not the pardonable act of a
dying man. It was the moral act of an ethical man--right not only in the
context of the times but also in retrospect. The behavior he is now being
excoriated for was not Orwellian, in the sense of 1984 's world of
inverted truth--but Orwell-like, meaning that it was in keeping with a career
based on political courage and intellectual integrity.
To understand why Orwell did what he did, it's
necessary to reconstruct a bit of history. Orwell's hatred of Soviet communism
dates from 1937, the year he volunteered to go fight in the Spanish Civil War.
In Barcelona, he was a witness to, and nearly a victim of, the Stalinist purge
of independent elements on the left. Members of the Republican militias not
controlled by Moscow--such as the POUM, for which Orwell fought--were being
jailed and murdered. When Orwell tried to spill the beans about what was
happening behind the lines, he was prevented by people who, though not CP
members, viewed criticism of the Soviet Union as intolerable. These included
Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman , and Victor Gollancz,
who had published Orwell's early books. Homage to Catalonia (1938),
which may be Orwell's finest work, was finally published by the tiny firm of
Secker & Warburg and sold only 700 copies. Orwell faced the same experience
when he finished Animal Farm during World War II. Because of its
criticism of the Soviet Union, no publisher but Warburg would touch it.
When
World War II ended, Orwell became preoccupied with Stalin's power grab in
Eastern Europe and the way those whom he saw as dishonest intellectuals in the
West were abetting it. With his friend Richard Rees, he played a game of trying
to figure out who was what in the fellow-traveling constellation. In his
notebook, Orwell listed 135 names--with remarks about who the people were, who
he guessed might be "some kind of agent," who a fellow traveler or "crypto,"
and who merely "stupid," "dishonest," or "naïve." He missed the mark a few
times--John Steinbeck and Orson Welles didn't fellow-travel very far. But
Orwell was often not just correct but also uncanny. Peter Smollett, a
journalist who headed the Russian Department of the British Ministry of
Information during the war and whom Orwell described as "almost certainly an
agent of some kind," was later revealed to be, in fact, a Soviet agent. Peter
Davison, the editor of the Complete Works , believes that Smollett was
the person who talked Jonathan Cape, a prominent British publisher, into
dropping Animal Farm . Orwell kept his private list up-to-date. When
Upton Sinclair, a fellow traveler in the 1930s, turned anti-Stalinist after the
war, Orwell crossed him out.
Orwell was not just a political commentator who spoke from
the sidelines. He was someone who believed in choosing sides and taking action,
even when the alternatives were imperfect. In 1948, he was busy arguing that it
was necessary to choose the United States over Russia in the emerging Cold War.
He criticized the editorial page of the Tribune , where he wrote a
regular column, for failing to take a pro-American position, even though the
paper was anti-Communist. It was in the midst of the Berlin Crisis in 1949 that
Orwell received a hospital visit from Celia Paget, the sister-in-law of his
friend and fellow anti-Stalinist Arthur Koestler. As Shelden recounts in his
biography, Koestler had fixed Paget up with Orwell after his wife suddenly died
in 1945. Orwell was enough taken with her to propose marriage, rather abruptly.
Though Paget refused him, they became good friends.
After going to work for the
IRD, a department roughly analogous to the U.S. Information Agency, she asked
Orwell for help in countering Communist propaganda around the world. Orwell
declined the offer of a commission to write a pamphlet, in part because he was
too ill--he was suffering from tuberculosis and would be dead in eight months.
But he was happy to recommend others suited to the task, such as Franz
Borkenau, an ex-Communist who wrote the best book other than Orwell's about the
Spanish Civil War. Orwell also told Paget that there were people the IRD should
avoid. He asked his friend Rees to bring the notebook he kept at home to the
sanitarium in the Cotswolds where he was dying. From his list of 135 names--not
all of which have been revealed, because some of the people are still
alive--Orwell chose only 35 people of whom he said he was fairly sure. The
New York
Times published excerpts from the larger list of 135,
even including people Orwell had crossed off, leaving the impression that he
had submitted them all for blacklisting. The names Orwell submitted are almost
certainly those marked with a red asterisk on his longer list and do not
include such familiar ones as Stephen Spender or Michael Redgrave.
Orwell
asked that his list remain secret not because there was anything shameful about
it, but because he feared it was libelous. Where he could say the same thing
publicly, he did. Many of those on his list are people Orwell wrote against in
the Tribune and in his "London Letter" for Partisan Review . There
is no analogy to the behavior of those like Elia Kazan, who named names before
House Un-American Activities Committee. Kazan betrayed friends in order to
protect himself. People lost their jobs and had their lives ruined as a result.
Orwell named enemies, not friends. And they weren't his personal enemies, they
were people he believed to be enemies of liberty. Nor were their civil
liberties infringed as a result. The only consequence of appearing on Orwell's
list is that you weren't likely to be asked for help by the British Foreign
Office.
Did
Orwell's list demonstrate he was anti-Semitic and anti-homosexual? If you
missed the link to the sidebar, click .
