by Norman Podhoretz
National Review, 27 Jan 1997
TIME was when a scandal involving an important British writer would have reverberated very loudly in American literary circles. Yet so great a cultural gap has opened up between London and New York that hardly a word has reached us here of a great controversy concerning George Orwell which erupted over there a few months ago.
What triggered the explosion was the discovery that back in 1949, shortly before he died, Orwell (in the words of the Guardian, the paper that broke the story) "offered to provide a secret Foreign Office propaganda unit linked to the intelligence services with names of writers and journalists he regarded as 'crypto-Communist' and 'fellow-travelers' who could not be trusted."
The offer was made to, and accepted by, a woman named Celia Kirwan (now Celia Goodman and still alive at 79), who, as it happened, had recently turned down another offer from Orwell -- this one of marriage -- but who remained on amicable terms with him. Miss Kirwan was also the sister-in-law of Orwell's friend and political ally Arthur Koestler, best known as the author of the classic anti-Communist novel Darkness at Noon.
As an employee of the Information Research Department (the covert operation in question) and as a friend of Orwell, Miss Kirwan was instructed to sound him out about whether he might be willing to participate in its work. According to an internal memo she filed at the time: "I discussed some aspects of our work with him in great confidence. He was delighted to learn of them, and expressed his wholehearted and enthusiastic approval of our aims." By this point, Orwell was too ill to do any writing for the IRD himself, but (as Mrs. Goodman now puts it): "I asked him who he thought were . . . the worthwhile writers on the anti-Communist front. . . . He gave me a few names, and I gave them to my department. And it was as simple as that."
Well, not quite. A little later Orwell, evidently on his own initiative, also gave Celia Kirwan that now notorious "blacklist" of writers to be shunned by the IRD because they were to one degree or another sympathetic to the Communist cause and to the Soviet Union as its leading embodiment.
The list is still classified, and a notebook in which he kept an even longer list (and from which he seems to have taken the names he gave to Miss Kirwan) is being held by the Orwell estate under lock and key until everyone on it is dead. Which means that all the "Marxist intellectuals of a certain age" who were said by the Sunday Independent to be itching to find out whether they were on Orwell's blacklist will never have their curiosity satisfied, at least not this side of the grave.
In its front-page story on the incident, the Guardian, obviously shocked itself, predicted that many others on the Left would also be shocked to discover that a fellow socialist had done such a thing. One wonders why. After all, any reader of Orwell would know that anti-Communism was one of his strongest passions. It was the driving force behind his two most famous novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It pervaded Homage to Catalonia, his memoir of the Spanish Civil War (in which he was seriously wounded fighting on the side of the Left against Franco but where his eyes were also opened to the murderous perfidy of the Communists and their Soviet masters). And it formed the theme of dozens of the articles and reviews he published as a prolific working journalist.
Any reader of Orwell would also know that he was a fervent English patriot. "My Country, Right or Left," he memorably declared in an essay excoriating the "anti-British" outlook that had been so fashionable on the Left throughout the 1930s. He himself had temporarily subscribed to this outlook in the first flush of his youthful socialist enthusiasms. But with the outbreak of World War II, while still considering himself a socialist, he began celebrating English institutions against the denigrations of the left-wing intelligentsia which, in his view, had so damaged the morale of the English people "that the Fascist nations judged that they were 'decadent,' and that it was safe to plunge into war."
In line with this new love of country, Orwell also proclaimed in the most forceful terms the basic human right to defend and fight for one's own simply because it was one's own and for no other reason whatever ("If someone drops a bomb on your mother, go and drop two bombs on his mother"). And along the same line, he found himself discovering more political and moral wisdom in the instincts and mores of ordinary Englishmen than in the sophisticated ideas of their putative betters in the intellectual class. ("One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that," he would famously write in 1945 after listing several egregious examples relating to the progress of World War II; "no ordinary man could be such a fool.")
These attitudes survived the defeat of Nazi Germany. Indeed, if anything they intensified with the emergence of the Soviet threat. For Orwell was among the first to see that Nazism and Communism, for all their apparent differences, were both forms of a new and higher stage in the history of despotism and tyranny. It was a stage in which every area of life, not merely the political sphere, was brought under state control: hence the name totalitarianism. Yet of these two forms of totalitarianism, the Soviet variety, to judge by the much greater amount of passionate attention he paid to it, clearly seemed to Orwell the more dangerous. And if the contempt left-wing intellectuals felt for their own country had in Orwell's judgment weakened the English resolve to stand up even to Nazi Germany, a regime they all detested, the same contempt might play an even more sinister role when compounded by their sympathy for the enemy. It could, he feared, smooth the way for the triumph of totalitarianism in its Communist guise.
Orwell was well aware that most of these people were too cautious to identify themselves forthrightly as Communists or to side openly with the Soviet Union. Instead they hid behind pacifism as a respectable way to oppose armed resistance to aggressive Soviet moves, and they espoused neutralism as a similarly acceptable position from which to undermine British support for the stand America was now beginning to take against Soviet expansionism. Beneath the pacifism, he charged, lay not a genuinely principled opposition to "violence as such, but only violence used in defense of the Western countries." Nor did the neutralism signify an honest refusal to choose between the United States and the Soviet Union; it was, rather, a cover for "anti-Americanism" in particular and for "hatred of Western democracy and admiration for totalitarianism" in general.
HOW then could anyone familiar with Orwell have been surprised, let alone shocked, by the revelation that this fervent patriot and profoundly principled anti-Communist was willing to cooperate with an agency of his own government in conducting an ideological battle against Communism and the Soviet Union? I for one would have been more surprised if he had turned down such a request for help.
Furthermore, given everything he knew about the success so many "crypto-Communists" and "fellow-travelers" enjoyed in concealing their true beliefs, it makes perfect sense that he would have considered it his patriotic duty to warn the IRD against certain writers who might allow themselves to be recruited precisely in order to undermine the agency from within.
Nevertheless, the Guardian was right in predicting that many on the Left would be shocked. Thus, the dethroned leader of the Labour Party, Michael Foot, professed amazement that his old friend and colleague should have been "dealing with the secret services in any form." Another dethroned leader of the Labour Party, Tony Benn, regretted that Orwell "gave in" to the pressures and temptations of an intelligence service that was "actually like the CIA and the KGB." And the left-wing journalist Paul Foot said that one now had to accept that Orwell had taken "a McCarthyite position toward the end of his life."
What accounts for these curious expressions of bewildered dismay? The answer is that many on the Left, in their great reluctance to admit that Orwell, whom they cherished as a literary jewel in their political crown, had for all practical purposes ceased being one of them, simply blinded themselves to the evidence. But the revelation that he did not even hesitate to "betray his own side" to the authorities, as the Marxist historian Christopher Hill put it, has finally broken the back of the longstanding effort to deny that Orwell did indeed defect from the Left.
On the other hand, a few leftists, led by Bernard Crick, one of Orwell's biographers, have managed to remain in a complacent state of denial. Crick once declared that Orwell was a "revolutionary" whose values could only be "willfully misunderstood . . . when he [was] claimed for the camp of the Cold War." Yet while Orwell might have been a revolutionary in his youth, the plain fact is that even then he spilled far more ink attacking and even ridiculing socialists than he ever did in criticizing the Right. "One sometimes gets the impression," he wrote as early as the mid Thirties, "that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw toward them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England." By the mid Forties Orwell was going even further -- so far as to write an extraordinarily sympathetic review of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom acknowledging that there was "a great deal of truth" in Hayek's thesis that "socialism leads to despotism," and that the collectivism entailed by socialism brings with it "concentration camps, leader worship, and war."
Still, since Orwell for some reason never gave up calling himself a socialist, and since he never saw any hope for the survival (let alone the triumph) of capitalism, Crick and others can make a case of sorts in continuing to claim him for the socialist faith. Where the Cold War is concerned, however, they have no case at all. Except for a few remarks that crop up here and there in his fugitive journalistic pieces, his position was unequivocal: ". . . the only big political questions in the world today are: for Russia - against Russia, for America - against America, for democracy -against democracy." As for him, he "would always choose America."
Yet so determined is Crick to go on pretending that Orwell did not belong to the "camp of the Cold War" that he has leaped to his hero's defense against those of his "fellow Leftists who are eager to discredit one of the greatest and bravest satirical writers England has known": "His values were republican in the old Roman sense, not nice liberal in the Guardian sense. If liberty is in danger you fight back to defend a civil order; you don't tie your hands behind your back as the Weimar Germans did when faced by the Nazis."
SO far so good. But fearing that even this much might make Orwell sound like a Cold Warrior, Crick immediately rushes to correct any such impression. Cloaking Orwell in the very neutralism he so fiercely denounced as a cover for appeasement of the Soviet Union, and adding insult to injury by decorating it with the kind of anti-British frill Orwell despised, Crick goes on to write: "But don't misread Nineteen Eighty-Four. It warned not just against Communism but against any kind of total power. . . . Orwell hit out at both directions, even at ourselves."
(In similar fashion, incidentally, here in America in the year 1984, when articles and symposia without number were devoted to Orwell's novel, most of them represented it as a warning against the United States, thereby proving that it is possible to be Orwellian even in interpreting Orwell.)
A slightly different tack in defense of Orwell has been taken by Christopher Hitchens, an English leftist transplanted to the United States whose piece in Vanity Fair is the only account of the controversy to have appeared here.
If Crick wants to hold onto Orwell because he regards him as a great satirist and an ornament to the Left, Hitchens reveres Orwell as "the lonely dissident who set his whole grit and fiber against the 'smelly little orthodoxies' that are the pox of the twentieth century." Blithely unaware that among those smelly little orthodoxies are a few to which he himself has subscribed, especially the neutralist position he took during the Cold War, Hitchens proceeds to absolve Orwell of the charge of "being some kind of premature McCarthyite." In sending the list of "crypto-Communists" and "fellow-travelers" to Celia Kirwan, Orwell "wasn't interested in unearthing heresy or in getting people fired or in putting them under the discipline of a loyalty oath. He just wanted to keep a clear accounting in the battle of ideas."
But of course much as Orwell cared about the battle of ideas, and much as he would have opposed McCarthy, his intention here was precisely to keep certain people from getting hired, and there seems little doubt that he would have tried to get them fired if they had already been on the job. The defense Hitchens mounts is just another way of refusing to face the extent and seriousness of Orwell's defection from the Left where the struggle against Communism was concerned.
"Dickens," Orwell once remarked, "is one of those writers who are well worth stealing." So is Orwell himself, and that is why the likes of Crick and Hitchens keep trying to snatch him out of the Cold War camp in which he so courageously and honorably ended his days and to draft him into the army of their own "smelly little orthodoxy." Thanks to the "blacklist" scandal, they now have fewer co-conspirators to help them along. But it is hard to imagine what if anything will ever get these diehards of the Left to acknowledge the truth about Orwell that they have labored so mightily and so long to conceal both from themselves and from others.
