by Michael Shelden
Electronic Telegraph, Saturday 27 June 1998
The story of how George Orwell compiled a
list of "crypto-Communists" and how it came to be sent to a secret government department reads like some lost episode from Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The tale begins not with politics but with the author's love of a beautiful young woman. In the 1940s, Celia Kirwan was a bright and vivacious personality widely known and liked in London literary circles. Her twin sister, Mamaine, was married to Orwell's friend and fellow campaigner against totalitarianism Arthur Koestler.
After the war Celia Kirwan was employed by a shadowy organisation in the Foreign Office known as IRD. Until the 1970s, very few people knew that the Information Research Department was an anti-Communist propaganda section responsible for undermining Soviet attempts to sway public opinion in the West. At some point in the late 1940s, Kirwan made it clear to Orwell that his vast political knowledge might be of some use to her bosses.
If she had not been involved with the IRD, it is doubtful that the author would have agreed to give it assistance. He was naturally suspicious of all such agencies, having learnt to distrust them as a young servant of the Empire in the Indian Imperial Police. But he was eager to help a woman to whom he had once proposed marriage and whose friendship he valued immensely. He wrote some of his most revealing and intimate letters to her - declaring in one that the touch of her body against his had sent an electric sensation of pleasure through him. He reluctantly accepted her friendly refusal to become his wife; but her romantic image haunted his thoughts as Julia's haunts Winston Smith's in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The situation was also inevitably influenced by Orwell's fears that he would die soon from tuberculosis. He put up a brave and determined fight against his disease, submitting to the latest experimental treatments and enduring great pain. His friend the newspaper editor David Astor went to heroic lengths to obtain for him the new American drug streptomycin, but nothing seemed to work. Weak and bedridden, he worried that death would deny him the chance to expose the threat from Stalin's "dishonest" friends in Britain and America. He wanted to leave something behind to set the record straight if no one else was going to step forward to attack the evasive, but effective, "fellow-travellers" and "crypto-Communists".
This desire is partly reflected in Winston Smith's desperate efforts to save the truth from being destroyed or perverted by his enemies. Nineteen Eighty-Four was originally called "The Last Man in Europe" because of Orwell's hope that the war against totalitarianism would not be lost so long as one person remained to fight. Acutely aware of his own limited time, he composed his list and gave parts of it to Celia Kirwan as one way of continuing his fight beyond the grave. If matters worsened and the Stalinists gained greater influence in the West, the list would continue to stand as a warning against certain people who might want to disguise their true intentions.
"Dishonest" and "unreliable" are the most frequent charges Orwell levels against the names in his blue notebook. It is not a hit-list or blacklist, but a record of those whom Orwell considered deceptive - and thus a collection of people whose influence needed to be resisted and whose offers of help needed to be carefully scrutinised. He was not out to suppress Communism or Communists, but merely to level the playing field by identifying the sympathies of those who tried to hide them. If such people "could get inside the Labour Party as an organised body," he warned, "they might be able to do enormous mischief."
As the history of the Cold War amply demonstrates, his concerns were not unfounded. In a million different ways the evils of Stalin's Russia were minimised and concealed by a small army of apologists in the universities of the West and in the media. He had personally suffered from such efforts when he wrote Animal Farm and discovered that Stalin's friends in England were determined to stop its publication. Victor Gollancz rejected the book because he believed it would damage the Soviet image in the West and so, too, did Jonathan Cape, on advice from an unnamed official in the wartime Ministry of Information.
The identity of that official has been an intriguing mystery for many years. However, Prof Peter Davison, editor of the 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell, to be published next month, feels certain that the villain can now be revealed as Peter Smollett, a former correspondent of The Times and chief of the Russian section at the Ministry of Information. Interestingly, Smollett's name not only appears on Orwell's list, but is also labelled as "very dishonest" and "almost certainly agent of some kind". The novelist was right. Both Professor Davison and other scholars have discovered that Smollett was indeed a Soviet agent who used his trusted position at The Times to spy on the West and spread subversion.
His real name was Peter Smolka and he came to London from his native Austria in the 1930s, when an English friend invited him to London. The friend's name was Kim Philby and, for a short time in the mid-1930s, Smolka/Smollett and Philby were partners in a small news service used as a front for gathering confidential information for Stalin.
It is doubtful that Orwell knew much about Smolka/Smollett, but his instincts told him to be wary of the man. He would not have been surprised to learn that this Austrian Communist disguised as a respectable journalist and bureaucrat was among the enemies of Animal Farm. The advantage that such enemies enjoyed was anonymity, and one purpose of Orwell's list was to take some of that protection away from them. Sadly, in Smolka/Smollett's case no one paid much attention to the warnings against him. He served The Times for many years as their man in Vienna and died with his reputation unsullied in 1980.
The most serious problem with Orwell's list is that he relied too much on instinct and guesswork. In some cases he was right, in others wrong. In the beginning, he kept his list as a kind of private exercise in which he could speculate at will and cast doubts on people who might not deserve such treatment. To his credit, he would come back and cross off names or place question marks beside them whenever further reflection or events caused him to reconsider. He did this for Charlie Chaplin, who appears in the notebook despite Orwell's complete lack of personal contact with him.
In America, Orwell is sometimes seen as a kindred spirit of John Steinbeck, but it is interesting to note that he had no respect for him, calling him a "spurious writer, pseudo-naif". In the Orwell lexicon, no terms could be more damning. A few other important writers receive unexpectedly strong disapproval. Orwell's friend Stephen Spender is described as "very unreliable" and "easily influenced". George Bernard Shaw cannot be trusted because he is "reliably pro-Russian on all major issues". The distinguished scientist and government adviser Solly Zuckerman is nothing less than "politically ignorant".
Almost everyone on the list is now dead, which is why it is finally being released. There was no dark conspiracy to keep it from the reading public, only the fear that living people might sue for libel. Orwell was well aware of that fact and sought to keep it confidential simply to avoid being sued. "I imagine that this list is very libellous, or slanderous, or whatever the term is," he wrote to Celia Kirwan, "so will you please see that it is returned to me without fail." Eventually, he decided to give the IRD only a partial version of his list, selecting "about 35 names" he was fairly sure of. He modestly informed Celia Kirwan that it was not a "very sensational" list; but he made a point of saying that it might do some good here and there.
Specifically, he mentioned that such warnings might stop "people like Peter Smollett worming their way into important propaganda jobs where they were probably able to do us a lot of harm". Though some critics may say that Orwell was simply engaging in Red-baiting, the truth is that his list had little impact on anyone's career. It may have amused Kirwan and a few other officials at the IRD, but, in a practical sense, it could do little to undermine the determined efforts of the many pro-Stalin propagandists in the West. In Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell achieved his aim by giving the world powerful stories that exposed duplicity and betrayal in universal ways.
What the list gives us is a vivid sense of the context in which Orwell's mind worked. His prejudices and raw emotions are at play in the list and reveal both his deep distrust of the Left and his vague hopes for a new form of democratic socialism. It gives us the dying voice of a decent man who, above all else, wanted more honesty and openness in public life, and who dreaded a world in which debate and scrutiny were curtailed by "smelly orthodoxy".
He betrayed no one by compiling his list. The betrayal had already occurred from his supposed friends on the Left, such as Gollancz and Kingsley Martin, who tried to stop him doing what he did so well - namely, facing unpleasant facts and discussing them freely.
He felt this betrayal most keenly when he tried to report the truth about Soviet treachery during the Spanish Civil War. Time and again, British colleagues tried to censor him and the efforts to discredit him had disastrous effects. His powerful account of the events in Spain, Homage to Catalonia, sold only 700 copies and his important warnings about the Stalinists went unheeded. His experience in Spain, where he barely escaped imprisonment on bogus charges cooked up by his Communist allies, marked the great turning point in his life. After Spain, he had a mission - to save British socialism from the danger of following the Soviet model, and to fight for the right to speak his mind.
The "cryptos" list is only one of many wonders to be discovered in Peter Davison's magnificent edition of Orwell's complete works. Running to more than 8,000 pages, it includes everything of even remote interest that flowed from Orwell's pen. The complete account of his wartime work as a BBC talks producer is given in rich and revealing detail, as are the important documents and letters which deal with his harrowing experiences in Spain. All in all, the edition contains more than a thousand letters, including some very warm and whimsical ones by his first wife, Eileen. Hundreds of previously uncollected reviews by Orwell are published, as well as such rarities as his lectures to the Home Guard and his notebooks outlining unfinished novels.
On the face of it, such a large edition may seem a bit over the top for a writer who died less than half a century ago. But as we near the beginning of a new century, it seems increasingly clear that Orwell is one of the true modern giants; a writer whose work continues to grow in stature and popularity, and whose books will undoubtedly be read another hundred years from now. He is one of those rare things - a national author, in the sense that Cervantes and Shakespeare and Tolstoy are national authors. Like them, he speaks for a whole country and an entire age.
When the readers of the 22nd century want to know what Britain was like in our time, they will go back to The Road to Wigan Pier and Coming Up for Air and Down and Out in Paris and London and - most especially - to the dozens of occasional essays in which Orwell captured so fondly the habits and traditions of the British people. He will tell the future what a perfect cup of tea tasted like or what it meant to sit and drink a pint at the pub. He will extol the values of country churchyards and penny postcards and old magazines for boys. He has preserved in his work what was so priceless, and what was often so soon discarded or forgotten by those who took their world for granted.
To borrow one of his own phrases, he was a "crystal spirit", a genius of such pure intensity and humanity that we must attend to his every word. Nothing he said is worth discarding, nothing he did is worth ignoring. As his friend Cyril Connolly astutely remarked, Orwell is an author "whose personality shines out in everything he said or wrote."
The cost of publishing something as large as The Complete Works of George Orwell will mean that, for most readers, the only glimpse they will have of it will be in a good library. But more affordable paperback editions will surely follow and, in due course, more of Orwell's wisdom and peerless prose will be available to the common reader. What Professor Davison has done is to lay the groundwork, faithfully and honestly, for those future paperback - and perhaps even electronic - collections. We are all deeply in his debt.
Peter Davidson is Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow at De Montfort University.
