by Andy Croft
New Statesman & Society, 18 March 1994
Have you noticed how quiet the Orwell industry is these days? Perhaps in the ten years since "that year" lost its popular resonance, Orwell's reputation has rather lost its shine. As any good millenarian knows, even a pessimistic one, "History asks to see your ticket one day". It would be nice to think that this most bloody-minded of writers (and it was, after all, a kind of socialist bloody-mindedness) simply refuses to attend the fin-de-siecle fancy-dress party we call contemporary culture.
Or is it just that no one needs Orwell any more? Anti-communism was never likely to survive communism for very long, still less the awkward-bugger Trotskyism that Orwell turned into cold-war political orthodoxy. So while we brace ourselves for the 50th anniversary of "Animal Farm" next year, it is worth remembering just what a bad-tempered and offensive writer he could be, and just how awkward his anti-communism once made everyone feel.
Critics have often wondered why Orwell's reply to Nancy Cunard's questionnaire "Authors Take Side on the Spanish War" was never published. The usual assumption is that it was dishonestly suppressed by Randall Swinglot, editor of Left Review, who published the replies in a sixpenny Left Review pamphlet. Well, now we know.
In August 1937, Nancy Cunard wrote to Swingler from Pads, enclosing Sylvia Pankhurst's reply, asking if Bernard Shaw had responded, and explaining that E M Forster did not wish to he included, "as he does not believe in authors signing manifestos".
She also enclosed the following reply from Orwell. It is dated 6 August 1937 and written on the back of the appeal by W H Auden, Louis Aragan, Pablo Neruda, Stephen Spender and Tristan Tzara, cadging for British writers to take sides:
"Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and Spender, I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody. Moreover, I know what is happening and has been happening on the Government side for months past, i.e. that Fascism is being riveted on to the Spanish workers under the pretext of resisting Fascism...
But the chances are that you--whoever you are who keep sending me this thing-have money and are well-informed: so no doubt you know something about the inner history of the war and have deliberately joined in the defence of "democracy" (i.e. capitalism) racket in order to aid in crushing the Spanish working class and thus indirectly defend your dirty little dividends...
By the way, tell your pansy friend Spender that I am preserving specimens of his war-heroics and that when the time comes when he squirms for shame at having written it, as the people who wrote the war propaganda in the Great War are squirming now, I shall rub it in good and hard."
Cunard had sent Orwell the questionnaire on the advice of Roger Sonhouse at Secker and Warburg, and she was clearly both horrified and intrigued by his response. "1 am really curious to know," she wrote to Swingler, "what kind of a man he was before he became a trotskist (sic), as shown. I wonder what kind of damage he has been doing, or trying to do, in Spain."
There is no suggestion, however, that Orwell was prevented from contributing to the published pamphlet. Indeed he was repeatedly invited to do so. And he clearly did not intend this letter, which was anyway too long, for publication.
"This is more than six lines," he admitted, "but if I did compress what I know and think about the Spanish war into six lines you wouldn't print it. You wouldn't have the gab."
In fact, Swingler and Cunard did publish statements by Former Brockway, C L R James and Ethel Mannin, each pushing the ILP-POUM line against "bourgeois democracy" in Spain. But at least they had answered the original questions. "Are you for, or against, the legal Government and People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?" As always, Orwell had rather mare to say about the failings of other socialists than about Fascism. As Nancy Cunard observed, "As this is not in any sense an 'answer' we are spared the mere quandry, even, of how to deal with it."
Orwell's letter was written between the publication of the first and second parts of his "Spilling the Beans" in the New English Weekly, in which the war in Spain became a struggle between "revolution" and bourgeois Communist "counter-revolution", where "Fascism and bourgeois 'democracy' are Tweedledum and Tweedledee". But not even there did he go so far as to suggest that the Republican government was itself "riveting" Fascism on to the Spanish workers.
Of the 148 statements published in "Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War", 127 writers declared themselves for democracy and against Fascism. And the homophobic, ultra-leftist, bad-tempered old Etonian Orwell was not one of them.
