Orwell's
List
by
Timothy Garton Ash
The
New York Review of Books (Vol. 50, No. 14) - 25 September
2003
So
there it was at last, the copy of George Orwell's
notorious list of "crypto-communists" that
went into the files of a semi-secret department
of the Foreign Office on May 4, 1949. It lay
before me in a buff folder on the office table
of a senior Foreign Office archivist. Despite all
the controversy around it, no unofficial
person had been allowed to see the list for more
than fifty-four years, since someone typed up
this official copy of the original list that
Orwell dispatched from his sickbed on May 2,
1949, to a close friend, Celia Kirwan. She had
recently begun work in the Foreign Office's Information
Research Department (IRD), which was concerned,
among other things, with producing anticommunist
propaganda. The list contains thirty-eight names
of journalists and writers who, as he had written
to Celia on April 6, "in my opinion are
crypto-communists, fellow-travellers or inclined
that way and should not be trusted as propagandists."
Orwell's list, which is divided into three columns headed "Name," "Job," and "Remarks," is
eclectic. It includes Charlie Chaplin, J.B. Priestley, and
the actor Michael Redgrave, all marked with "?" or "??," implying
doubt whether they really were crypto-communists or fellow
travelers. E.H. Carr, the historian of international relations
and Soviet Russia, is dismissed as "Appeaser only." The
editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, an old
bête noire of Orwell's, gets the gloriously back-handed
comment "?? Too dishonest to be outright 'crypto' or
fellow-traveller, but reliably pro-Russian on all major issues." Beside
the New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty
and the former Trotskyist writer Isaac Deutscher ("Sympathiser
only"), there are many lesser-known writers and journalists,
starting with an industrial correspondent of the Manchester
Guardian, described as "Probably sympathiser only.
Good reporter. Stupid."
Over the last decade, "Orwell's List" has been
the subject of many articles with lurid headlines such as "Big
Brother of the Foreign Office," "Socialist
Icon Who Became an Informer," and "How Orwell's
Blacklist Aided Secret Service." All this speculative
denunciation of the author of 1984 has
been based on three incomplete sources: the publication of
many (but not all) entries from the strictly private notebook
in which Orwell attempted to identify "cryptos" and "F.T." (his
abbreviation for fellow travelers), his published correspondence
with Celia Kirwan, and the partial release seven years ago
of the relevant files from the Information Research Department
of the Foreign Office. But in file FO 1110/189 a card was
inserted, next to a copy of Orwell's letter to Celia of April
6, 1949, saying a document had been withheld.
There the matter rested, with Her Majesty's Government solicitously
guarding one of Orwell's last secrets, until shortly after
Celia Kirwan's death last autumn, when her daughter, Ariane
Bankes, found a copy of the list among her mother's papers,
and subsequently invited me to write about it. After we published
the list in the Guardian, I asked the British foreign
secretary, Jack Straw, to release the original.[1] He
agreed, "since all the information contained in it is
now in the public domain," and anyone interested can
now read it in its proper place, file FO 1110/189 at the
British National Archives.
1.
So there is the text. What is the context? In February 1949,
George Orwell was lying in a sanatorium in the Cotswolds,
very ill with the TB that would kill him within a year. That
winter, he had worn himself out in a last effort to retype
the whole manuscript of 1984, his bleak warning of
what might happen if Britain succumbed to totalitarianism.
He was lonely, despairing of his own wasted health, at the
age of just forty-five, and deeply pessimistic about the
advance of Russian communism, whose cruelty and treacherousness
he had personally experienced, nearly at the cost of his
own life in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. The communists
had just taken over Czechoslovakia, in the Prague coup of
February 1948, and they were now blockading West Berlin,
trying to strangle the city into submission.
He thought there was a war on, a "cold war," and
he feared that the Western nations were losing it. One reason
we were losing, he thought, was that public opinion had been
blinded to the true nature of Soviet communism. In part,
this blinding was the product of understandable gratitude
for the Soviet Union's immense role in defeating Nazism.
However, it was also the work of a poisonous array of naive
and sentimental admirers of the Soviet system, declared Communist
Party (CP) members, covert ("crypto-") communists,
and paid Soviet spies. It was these people, he suspected,
who had made it so difficult for him to get his anti-Soviet
fable Animal
Farm published in the last year of the last war.
However, he also knew this was a time in which genuine,
idealistic believers in communism were becoming disgusted
by what they saw. Some turned into the most acute critics
of The God That Failed, to quote the title of the
famous book about communism co-edited by Arthur Koestler
and the Labour MP Richard Crossman which appeared in the
month of Orwell's death, January 1950, with an introduction
by Crossman and essays by, among others, Koestler, Stephen
Spender, and Ignazio Silone. These writers were especially
important to anticommunist leftists like Orwell who were
convinced, as he himself wrote, "that the destruction
of the Soviet myth [is] essential if we want to revive the
Socialist movement." At some point in the mid- to late
1940s he had started keeping a private notebook in which
he tried to work out who was what: outright member of the
CP, agent, "F.T.," sentimental sympathizer....
The notebook, which I have been able to consult without
restriction at the Orwell Archive at University College,
London, shows that he worried away at the list. It contains
entries in pen and pencil, with asterisks in red and blue
against some names. There are 135 names in all, of which
ten have been crossed out, either because the person had
died—like Fiorello La Guardia, the former mayor of
New York—or because Orwell had decided they were not
crypto-communists or fellow travelers. Thus, for example,
the name of the historian A.J.P. Taylor is crossed out, with
Orwell's heavily underlined remark "Took anti-CP line
at Wroclaw Conference," as is that of the American novelist
Upton Sinclair, on whom, rejecting his own earlier assessment,
Orwell comments: "No. Denounced Czech coup & Wroclaw
conference." Stephen Spender ("Sentimental sympathiser...
Tendency towards homosexuality") and Richard Crossman
("Too dishonest to be outright F.T.") are not yet
crossed out; but this was before the appearance of The
God That Failed. The way Orwell agonized over his individual
assessments is shown by the entry on J.B. Priestley. This
has against it a red asterisk, which is crossed out with
black cross-hatching and then encircled in blue with an added
question mark.
To this depressed and mortally ill political writer of genius
there came, in February 1949, a delightful piece of personal
news. Celia Kirwan (née Paget) had returned to London
from Paris. Celia was a strikingly beautiful, vivacious,
and warmhearted young woman who moved in left-wing literary
circles, as did her twin sister Mamaine, then married to
Orwell's friend Arthur Koestler. Orwell had met Celia when
they spent Christmas together in Wales with Arthur and Mamaine
in 1945. He was lonely and in some emotional turmoil after
the death of his first wife earlier that year. Celia and
he got on very well, and met again several times in London.
One evening just five weeks after their first meeting, he
sent her a passionate letter, full of tender feeling and
rather clumsily proposing either marriage or an affair. It
ended, "good night my dearest love, George." Celia
gently refused him in what she later described as a "rather
ambiguous letter," but they remained close friends.
A year later, she went to work for an intellectual review
in Paris.
"Dearest Celia," he now wrote from the Cotswold
Sanatorium on February 13, "how delight-ful to get your
letter and know that you are in England again." "I
will send you a copy of my new book [i.e., 1984] when
it comes out (about June I think), but I don't think you'll
like it; it's an awful book really." Saying he hoped
to see her "some time, perhaps in the summer" he
signed off "with much love, George."
Sooner than expected, on March 29, Celia came to visit him
in Gloucestershire; but she also came with a mission. She
was working for this new department of the Foreign Office,
trying to counter the assault waves of communist propaganda
emanating from Stalin's recently founded Cominform. Could
he help? As she recorded in her official memorandum of their
meeting, Orwell "expressed his whole-hearted and enthusiastic
approval of our aims." He couldn't write anything for
IRD himself, he said, because he was too ill and didn't like
to write "on commission," but he suggested several
people who might. On April 6 he followed up with a letter
in his neat, rather delicate handwriting, suggesting a few
more names and offering his list of those "who should
not be trusted as propagandists. But for that I shall have
to send for a notebook which I have at home, and if I do
give you such a list it is strictly confidential, as I imagine
it is libellous to describe somebody as a fellow-traveller."
Celia circulated the letter to her superior, Adam Watson,
who made some comments, then added,
P.S. Mrs. Kirwan should certainly ask Mr. Orwell for the
list of crypto-communists. She would "treat it with
every confidence" and send it back after a day or two.
I hope the list gives reasons in each case.
Mrs. Kirwan did as she was asked, writing from "Foreign
Office, 17 Carlton House Terrace" on April 30:
Dear George, Thank you so much for your helpful suggestions.
My department were very interested to see them.... They have
asked me to say that they would be very grateful if you could
let us look at your list of fellow-travelling and crypto
journalists: we would treat it with the utmost discretion.
Her letter, at least in the typewritten version contained
in file FO 1110/189, has a cooler ending than his: "Yours
ever, Celia."
Meanwhile, Orwell asked his old friend Richard Rees to send
him the notebook from the remote house on the
Scottish island of Jura where he had written 1984.
Thanking him for it on April 17, he writes:
Cole [i.e., the historian G.D.H. Cole] I think should probably
not be on the list but I would be less certain of him than
of Laski in case of a war.... The whole business is very
tricky, and one can never do more than use one's judgement
and treat each case individually.
So we must imagine Orwell lying in his sanatorium bed, gaunt
and wretched, going through the notebook, perhaps adding
a blue question mark to the red asterisk and black cross-hatching
on Priestley, wondering how Cole or Laski, Crossman or Spender
would behave in the event of a real, shooting war with the
Soviet Union—and which of the 135 names to pass on
to Celia.
On receiving her note, he wrote back at once, enclosing
his list of thirty-eight: "It isn't very sensational
and I don't suppose it will tell your friends anything they
don't know." (Note the reference to "your friends";
Orwell had no illusion that this was just going to her.)
At the same time it isn't a bad idea to have the people
who are probably unreliable listed. If it had been done earlier
it would have stopped people like Peter Smollett worming
their way into important propaganda jobs where they were
probably able to do us a lot of harm. Even as it stands I
imagine that this list is very libellous, or slanderous,
or whatever the term is, so will you please see that it is
returned to me without fail.
The letter was signed "with love, George."
On the same day, he wrote again to Richard Rees:
Suppose for example that Laski had possession of an important
military secret. Would he betray it to the Russian military
intelligence? I don't imagine so, because he has not actually
made up his mind to be a traitor, & the nature of what
he was doing would in that case be quite clear. But a real
Communist would, of course, hand the secret over without
any sense of guilt, & so would a real crypto, such as
Pritt [the MP, D.N. Pritt]. The whole difficulty is to decide
where each person stands, & one has to treat each case
individually.
2.
At this point, maddeningly, the paper trail goes cold. We
know that Celia Kirwan was supposed to come to see Orwell
on the next Sunday and that he thanked her on May 13 for
sending a bottle of brandy. Did she return the list if she
went to visit him again, having had the copy now in file
FO 1110/189 typed up in the department? What did they say
at that meeting, if it took place? What happened next? Were
these names handed on to any other department?
The file itself shows no further action taken with respect
to the names listed. In his letter to me, announcing the
release of the original, the foreign secretary writes, "A
check of our records confirms that the list is the only document
about Orwell's contacts with IRD that has been withheld." But
a good many other IRD files have been withheld, and parts
of released documents blanked out, on the grounds that they
contain intelligence-related matter and are therefore covered
by what Foreign Office archivists call "the blanket." Anyway,
only part of the truth is ever contained in files.
A serious answer to these questions requires a judgment
on the nature of this mysterious department, the IRD. I have
therefore immersed myself in the published literature about
it and read some of the files that have been released to
the Public Record Office.[2] I
have also talked to several former members of the department
at that time. They include Adam Watson, the official who
instructed Celia Kirwan to ask Orwell for his list; Robert
Conquest, the veteran chronicler of Soviet terror, who subsequently
shared an office with Celia Kirwan and himself fell "madly
in love" with her; and the aptly named John Cloake.
The picture that emerges is of an ill-defined outfit, with
a very diverse group of people fumbling their way from the
recently finished war against fascist totalitarianism, in
which most of them had fought, into the new "cold" war
against the communist totalitarianism of Britain's recent
wartime ally. IRD was a semisecret department. Unlike the
secret intelligence service, popularly known as MI6, whose
very existence was denied by the government, IRD appeared
in the lists of Foreign Office departments, but not all its
officers were identified there. Much of its funding came
from the "Secret Vote," a governmental appropriation
used to fund the secret services and not subject to the usual
forms of parliamentary scrutiny. An internal Foreign Office
description from 1951 says flatly, "It should be noted
that the name of this department is intended as a disguise
for the true nature of its work, which must remain strictly
confidential."[3]
In the beginning, that "true nature" was mainly
to collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet
and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists,
politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially
and otherwise, anticommunist publications. The department
was established by the Labour foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin,
and it was particularly interested in authors with good credentials
on the left. Bertrand Russell, for example, wrote three short
books whose publication was subsidized by the IRD: Why
Communism Must Fail, What Is Freedom?, and What
Is Democracy? According to IRD veterans, some authors,
like Russell, knew perfectly well that the publisher (Background
Books) who approached them to write a book was backed by
this semisecret department of the Foreign Office; others,
such as the philosopher Bryan Magee, who contributed The
Democratic Revolution, were outraged when they subsequently
learned the source of the publisher's funds. The pattern
is familiar from other well-known episodes of the cultural
cold war, such as the CIA funding for Encounter.
The better-known of these authors would obviously have been
published anyway, but IRD helped to give their work a wider
circulation, especially in foreign countries that were already
under communism or seen as threatened by it. In Orwell's
case, it supported Burmese, Chinese, and Arabic editions
of his Animal Farm, commissioned a rather crude strip-cartoon
version of the same book (giving the pig Major a Lenin beard,
and the pig Napoleon a Stalin moustache, in case simple-minded
readers didn't get the point), and organized showings in "backward" areas
of the British Commonwealth of a CIA-financed—and politically
distorted —animated film of Animal Farm.
The department also established a close working relationship
with the overseas services of the BBC. In one file that I
have read, IRD officials tried to press Sir Ian Jacob, then
head of the BBC's European Service, to adopt its recommendations
for the choice of words to describe the Soviet state.[4] (One
choice example: "POLICE STATE. Another useful phrase
which underlines this sometimes overlooked but essential
aspect of the system.") In this case, the BBC resisted
the pressure, and the Foreign Office official overseeing
IRD told his subordinates to back off.
However, it seems that some IRD operatives did not stop
with these relatively mild means of what Ernest Bevin called "anti-communist
publicity." Using methods they had learned in the previous
war, working for the Political Warfare Executive or for MI6,
they apparently tried to combat what they saw as communist
infiltration of the trade unions, the BBC, or organizations
like the National Council for Civil Liberties by identifying
members who were or were alleged to be communists, by spreading
dark rumors about their activities—and perhaps worse.
So we must imagine Robert Conquest sitting in one room at
Carlton House Terrace, scrupulously gathering and sifting
information about East European politics. In another office,
a former member of the World War II Political Warfare Executive
or of MI6 might be preparing some slightly less scrupulous
operation. Next door you could meet the charming professional
diplomat Guy Burgess, who worked in IRD for three months—and,
being a Soviet agent, told his controllers in Moscow all
about it. Down the corridor, though only beginning in 1952,
sat a young woman called Fay. The novelist Fay Weldon later
recalled that when a visitor came from MI6 she and her colleagues
would be told "turn your backs!" so this James
Bond figure could walk down the corridor unseen. ("Watch
the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by.") But
they peeked.
As the cold war intensified, the white propaganda of the
early years seems to have been increasingly supplemented
with gray and black. By the late 1950s, according to someone
who worked for British intelligence agencies at that time,
IRD had a reputation as "the dirty tricks department" of
the Foreign Office, indulging in character assassination,
false telegrams, putting itching powder on lavatory seats,
and other such cold war pranks...little of which will be
found in the files, even if the intelligence-related ones
are finally released.
All the survivors insist that it is most unlikely that any
names supplied by Orwell in 1949 would have been passed on
to anyone else, and especially not to MI5, Britain's domestic
security service, or MI6, in charge of foreign intelligence. "In
all honesty," Adam Watson told me, "I cannot remember
any case in which we said [to MI5 or MI6], "Did you
realize that X says So-and-so is a crypto-communist?" However,
as Mr. Watson himself cautioned me, "old men forget." Clearly
no one can ever know exactly what, say, the head of the department,
Ralph Murray, might have muttered to a friend from MI6 over
a brandy at the Travellers' Club, just around the corner
from Carlton House Terrace.
Celia Kirwan always strongly defended Orwell's contribution
to the work of IRD. In the 1990s there was fevered speculation
about his list. The Marxist historian Christopher Hill said, "I
always knew he was two-faced." The Labour MP Gerald
Kaufman wrote in the Evening Standard that "Orwell
was a Big Brother too." Celia Kirwan insisted:
I think George was quite right to do it.... And, of course,
everybody thinks that these people were going to be shot
at dawn. The only thing that was going to happen to them
was that they wouldn't be asked to write for the Information
Research Department.
Some writers today suggest the IRD's anticommunist activities
were Britain's equivalent of the McCarthyite witch-hunt.
If so, then one is struck by how mild it was by comparison
with the American McCarthyism which prompted Arthur Miller
to write The Crucible and Charlie Chaplin to flee
back to Orwell's Britain.
Consider who some of the people on the list were, and what
happened to them. Peter Smollett was singled out by Orwell
for special mention in his covering letter to Celia. Under "Remarks" on
his list, Orwell noted: "...gives strong impression
of being some kind of Russian agent. Very slimy person." Born
in Vienna as Peter Smolka, during World War II Smollett was
the head of the Soviet section in the British Ministry of
Information—one of Orwell's inspirations for the Ministry
of Truth. We now know two more things about him. First, according
to the Mitrokhin Archive of KGB documents, Smollett-Smolka
actually was a Soviet agent, recruited by Kim Philby, with
the codename "ABO." Second, he was almost certainly
the official on whose advice the publisher Jonathan Cape
turned down Animal Farm as an unhealthily anti-Soviet
text. How, then, did the British state prosecute or persecute
this Soviet agent? By making him an Officer of the British
Empire (OBE). Subsequently, he was the London Times correspondent
in Central Europe. The worst thing that seems to have happened
to him is that some of his short stories about postwar Vienna
were heavily drawn upon by Graham Greene for The Third
Man. In the film, he makes an insider-joke phantom appearance
as what the viewer must assume is the name of a bar or nightclub
called "Smolka."
The Labour MP Tom Driberg— "Usually named as
'crypto,' but in my opinion NOT reliably pro-CP"—was,
according to the Mitrokhin KGB papers, recruited in 1956
as a doubtless deeply unreliable Soviet agent (codename LEPAGE),
after a compromising homosexual encounter with an agent of
the KGB's Second Chief Directorate in a lavatory under the
Metropole hotel in Moscow. Nonetheless, he ended his life
as a celebrated writer and Lord Bradwell of Bradwell juxta
mare. E.H. Carr, Isaac Deutscher, the novelist Naomi Mitchison
(a "silly sympathiser"), and J.B. Priestley all
pursued very successful careers without, so far as we know,
any hindrance from the British government. Michael Redgrave
went on, ironically enough, to play a leading role in the
1956 film of Orwell's 1984.
In other words, nothing bad happened to them even when,
as in the case of Smollett, it arguably should have. To be
sure, we cannot conclusively say that this was true of all
the lesser-known writers and journalists on the list of thirty-eight:
that requires further investigation. The only case of anything
like a possible "blacklisting" that I have found
so far is that of Alaric Jacob, a minor writer who had attended
the same private school as Orwell and followed his subsequent
progress with resentment. According to one study of British
political vetting, Alaric Jacob joined the BBC monitoring
service at Caversham in August 1948, but in February 1951
was "suddenly refused establishment rights, which meant
he would receive no pension."[5] He
complained to his cousin, the same Sir Ian Jacob who had
dealings with IRD and later became director general of the
BBC. Alaric Jacob's establishment and pension rights were
restored shortly after his wife—Iris Morley, who also
appears on Orwell's list—died in 1953.
The way in which the BBC collaborated with semisecret departments
like the IRD, and with the intelligence services for secret
vetting of its employees, is one of the murkier passages
of Britain's cold war. But a two-year loss of BBC "establishment
rights" is hardly Darkness at Noon or a session in Room
101. Anyway, there is no evidence that Orwell's list had
anything to do with the temporary blacklisting of Alaric
Jacob nearly two years later.
3.
"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are
proved innocent," Orwell wrote of Gandhi just a few
months before he sent Celia the list. Orwell's rule must
now apply to Orwell himself, the Saint George of English
political writing. Yet even when all possible files are released
and a scrupulous historian has weighed all the available
evidence on IRD, the BBC, and the rest, his "innocence" can
never finally be proven. Perhaps Orwell would anyway not
want to plead innocent but rather growl "guilty as charged." It
all depends on the charge.
If the charge is that Orwell was a cold warrior, the answer
is plainly yes. Orwell was a cold warrior even before the
cold war began, warning against the danger of Soviet totalitarianism
in Animal Farm when most people were still celebrating
our heroic Soviet ally. He appears in the Oxford English
Dictionary as the first writer ever to use the term "cold
war" in English. He had fought with a gun in his hand
against fascism in Spain, and was wounded by a bullet through
his throat. He fought communism with his typewriter, and
hastened his death by the exertion.
If the charge is that he was a secret police informer, the
answer is plainly no. IRD was an odd cold war outfit, but
it was nothing like a Thought Police. Unlike that dreadful
genius Bertolt Brecht, Orwell never believed that the end
justified the means. Again and again, we find him insisting
to Richard Rees that you have to treat each case individually.
He opposed the banning of the Communist Party in Britain.
The Freedom Defence Committee, of which he was vice-chairman,
thought political vetting of civil servants a necessary evil,
but insisted that the person concerned should be represented
by a trade union, that corroborative evidence must be produced,
and that the accused should be allowed to cross-examine those
giving evidence against him. Hardly the methods of the KGB —or,
indeed, of MI5 or the FBI during the cold war. He told Celia
that he approved of the aims of IRD; this does not mean that
he would have approved of their subsequent methods.
The list invites us to reflect again on the asymmetry of
our attitudes toward Nazism and communism. Orwell liked making
lists. In a London Letter to Partisan Review in 1942
he wrote, "I think I could make out at least a preliminary
list of the people who would go over" to the Nazi side
if the Germans occupied England. Suppose he had. Suppose
his list of crypto-Nazis had gone to the Political Warfare
Executive. Would anyone be objecting?
The long-overdue publication of the IRD list also highlights
the vital distinction, so often blurred, between Orwell's
private notebook and the list he sent to Celia at the Foreign
Office. Readers may, according to taste, be more shocked
or amused by the entries in his notebook. There is about
them a touch of the old imperial policeman, a hint of the
spy, as well as a generous dose of his characteristic, gruff
black humor. (He includes someone from the "Income Tax
Dep't" in his notebook list: bloody communists, those
tax inspectors.) But all writers are spies. They peek, like
Fay Weldon in Carlton House Terrace. They secretly write
things down in notebooks.
One aspect of the notebook that shocks our contemporary
sensibility is his ethnic labeling of people, especially
the eight variations of "Jewish?" (Charlie Chaplin), "Polish
Jew," "English Jew," or "Jewess." Orwell's
entire life was a struggle to overcome the prejudices of
his class and generation; here was one he never fully overcame.
What remains most unsettling about the list he actually
sent is the way in which a writer whose name is now a synonym
for political independence and journalistic honesty is drawn
into collaboration with a bureaucratic department of propaganda,
however marginal the collaboration, "white" the
propaganda, and good the cause. In the files of the IRD,
you find the kind of bureaucratic language that we now habitually
describe as Orwellian or Kafkaesque. Next to the very personal
handwritten letter from Orwell ("Dear Celia...with love,
George") in FO 1110/189 is a typewritten communication
from the British embassy in Moscow: "Dear Department," it
begins, and is signed, surreally, "yours ever, Chancery."
Yet perhaps we should not be surprised, for Orwell knew
this kind of world from inside, and drew on it for his "awful
book." While 1984 was a warning against totalitarianism
of both the Nazi (that is, National Socialist) and communist
(that is, Soviet Socialist) kind—hence "Ingsoc"—much
of the physical detail was derived from his experience of
wartime London, working in the BBC, itself a considerable
British bureaucracy in close touch with the Ministry of Information
and home to the original Room 101.
The most delicate and speculative part of any interpretation
concerns Orwell's relationship with Celia Kirwan. There is,
in his letters to Celia, an almost painful eagerness. You
sense in them his continued strong feelings for a particularly
attractive, warmhearted, and cultured woman. But in all we
know about him at this time, you also sense something broader:
the more generalized, rather desperate craving of a mortally
sick man for affectionate female support. One recalls the
emotional turmoil of three years before, when he precipitately
proposed not just to Celia but also to two or three other
younger women. Lonely, stuck in that Cotswold sanatorium,
loathing the thought that he was physically done for at the
age of forty-five, did he yearn to combat approaching death
with the love of a beautiful woman?
Celia, while remaining a staunch friend, did not encourage
any renewal of George's gruff advances. However, soon after
their exchange about the list another beautiful young Englishwoman,
to whom he had also proposed in that earlier bout of emotional
turmoil, returned from Paris, like Celia, and came to see
him at the sanatorium. In Sonia Brownell's case, she was
on the rebound from a passionate romance with the French
philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Perhaps sensing some encouragement,
Orwell proposed to her again. Egged on by his forceful publisher,
Frederic Warburg, Sonia accepted.
In 1984, Winston Smith's protest against totalitarian
bureaucracy is to have sex with Julia—a character at
least partly modeled on Sonia. In real life, was it, at least
in part, his desire for Celia's affectionate attention that
brought "Mr. Orwell" into the secret files of the
British bureaucracy?
This biographical speculation is not to trivialize his conscious
political choice to supply those names to a department of
the Foreign Office. Nonetheless, you have to ask yourself
this question: Had it been a bowler-hatted and pin-striped
Mr. Cloake who came to visit him on March 29, 1949, would
he have offered to send him the list? But it wasn't Mr. Cloake.
It was his "dearest Celia."
Orwell sought desperately to fight his last enemy, death;
yet it was his early death that secured his immortality.
Tempting as it is to speculate, in the light of the list,
about which way he would have gone if he had lived—an
iconoclastic left-wing voice on the New Statesman?
a curmudgeonly old cold warrior on Encounter?—this
is strictly illegitimate. We will never know. One thing,
however, is clear: he would have taken definite, strong political
stands, and therefore alienated people on the left or the
right, and probably both. Only his early death allowed everyone
to beatify him in their own way. And he would have written
more books—possibly, as his previous novels and last
draft story might suggest, less good ones than Animal
Farm and 1984. Untimely death made him the James
Dean of the cold war, the John F. Kennedy of English letters.
How we would all have loved to read his views on the building
of the Berlin Wall, on the Vietnam War, and on the 1968 student
protests. How I would have enjoyed meeting him in Central
Europe in 1989, aged eighty-six, as the Soviet communist
Big Brother finally collapsed. How wonderful it would be
to hear his voice today—a voice that we imagine all
the more vividly because no recording of it survives—commenting
on the propaganda language of the Iraq war, or the continuing
miseries of Burma, or the dilemmas of Tony Blair. But the
hundred-year-old Orwell growls through the asterisks and
crossouts of his notebook, "Don't be silly. Work it
out for yourself."
Notes
[1] Guardian
Review, June 21, 2003, reprints the whole list.
[2] A
detailed but tendentious account is Paul Lashmar and
James Oliver, Britain's Secret Propaganda War, 1948–1977 (Sutton,
1998). A shorter but much more nuanced treatment is in
Hugh Wilford, The CIA, the British Left and the Cold
War: Calling the Tune? (Frank Cass, 2003). See also
W. Scott Lucas and C.J. Morris, "A Very British
Crusade: The Information Research Department and the
Beginning of the Cold War," in British Intelligence,
Strategy and the Cold War, edited by Richard J. Aldrich
(Routledge, 1992); Phillip Deery, "Confronting the
Cominform: George Orwell and the Cold War Offensive of
the Information Research Department, 1948–50," in Labour
History, No. 73 (November 1977); IRD: Origins
and Establishment of the Foreign Office Information Research
Department, 1946–48 (FCO Historians' History
Notes, No. 9, August 1995); and the brief, accusatory treatment
in Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The
CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Granta, 1999).
[3] Minute
of April 21, 1951, in FO 1110/383.
[4] See
FO 1110/191.
[5] Mark
Hollingsworth and Richard Norton-Taylor, Blacklist:
The Inside Story of Political Vetting (Hogarth Press,
1988).
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