Revenge of the smelly little orthodoxies

National Review, Jan 27, 1997 by Norman Podhoretz

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.