Review Article

Life After Death: The Relevance of George Orwell

Journal of Contemporary History 48(4) 890–898 ! The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0022009413494565 jch.sagepub.com

John Newsinger Bath Spa University, UK

Peter Davison (ed.), The Lost Orwell, London, Timewell Press, 2006; x + 258 pp.; £18.99 hbk; ISBN 1857252144 Stephen Ingle, The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell, London, Routledge, 2006; 240 pp.; £23.50 pbk; ISBN 9780415479813 Ben Clarke, Orwell In Context: Communities, Myth, Values, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; ix + 225 pp.; £50.00 hbk; ISBN 9780230517691 Philip Bounds, Orwell and Marxism: The Political and Cultural Thinking of George Orwell, London, IB Tauris; ix + 253 pp.; £54.50 hbk; ISBN 9781845118075 Daniel J. Leab, Orwell Subverted: The CIA and the Filming of Animal Farm, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007; 232 pp.; US$21.95 pbk; ISBN 9780271029788

Why the continuing interest in George Orwell? There are a number of reasons. Most important is his hostility to Stalinism, to both the Soviet Union and its apologists in the British Communist Party, but from a committed socialist standpoint. The comparative novelty of this stance has seen Orwell’s reputation survive, while that of a variety of Cold Warriors, those for whom ‘God had failed’, have suffered eclipse. While Orwell’s writings and reputation were certainly used as propaganda weapons in the Cold War, by the end of the 1960s he was beginning to escape from this particular posthumous conscription. An important publishing event, the publication of Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus’s edition of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, was of critical importance here.1 These four volumes made clear that Orwell could not be honestly reduced to the status of a Cold War foot-soldier; indeed, on a personal note, I can still remember the excitement of encountering this particular incarnation of the Orwell as an undergraduate. The political context was also important: the American War in Vietnam and the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Orwell’s writings seemed 1

S. Orwell and I. Angus, The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (London 1968).

Corresponding author: John Newsinger, 8 Roundhill Road, Leicester, LE5 5RJ, UK. Email: [email protected]

Newsinger

891

to critically address both of these episodes, or at least to provide the intellectual resources for an independent stance, critical of both Washington and Moscow. Another important factor is his writing on class. Orwell remains one of the finest literary explorers of the British class system, and, of course, a good case can be made that the road to Wigan pier remains very much part of contemporary social geography. His concern with Englishness and with patriotism continues to be of considerable interest. Once again, his distinctive stance marks him out with Orwell’s embrace of patriotism culminating in his advocacy of a United Socialist States of Europe. Orwell can be legitimately considered as the founder of Cultural Studies, as someone who applied himself to the serious study of popular culture, its forms and its significance. This claim is not generally acknowledged in the field because his work was not theoretically informed, or to put it another way, was clearly expressed and intelligible. And there is a negative, but still important, interest in Orwell: his attitude towards issues of gender, his particular construction of masculinity and femininity. One last point that will require exploration in years to come is the surprising extent to which Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four still seem to address social and political fears, feelings of betrayal and powerlessness. Which brings us to Peter Davison’s continuing hunt for Orwell material. Let us start with a letter that Orwell wrote to Sergei Dinamov, the editor of a Russian publication, International Literature, in reply to a request for a copy of The Road to Wigan Pier. He told the Russian that he had only just got back from Spain. In the light of what he had seen there, he now thought that the concerns of the second half of the book ‘may seem rather trivial outside England’, although he had been ‘preoccupied with them at the time of writing’. Now, however, ‘my experiences in Spain have made me reconsider many of my opinions’. He went on: I must tell you that in Spain I was serving in the militia of the POUM [Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista—The Workers Party of Marxist Unification] which as you no doubt know has been bitterly denounced by the Communist Party and was recently suppressed by the Government.

He made clear that ‘after what I have seen I am more in agreement with the policy of the POUM than with the Communist Party’. He suspected that International Literature would not want to have any dealings with ‘a POUM member’ (99–100). Orwell was, of course, quite correct in this suspicion. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that when the unfortunate Sergei Dinamov was arrested the following year, his correspondence with Orwell would not have counted in his favour. He disappeared into the Gulag and was probably shot some time in 1939. What this new piece of correspondence from Peter Davison’s collection, The Lost Orwell, shows is the extent to which the politics of literature could be a matter of life and death in the 1930s and 1940s. This is a point to which we will return. In The Lost Orwell, Davison brings together material that surfaced too late for inclusion in his magnificent edition of Orwell’s Complete Works. The Complete Works was a scholarly achievement of inestimable value, one of the great

892

Journal of Contemporary History 48(4)

publishing events of the 1990s, and the new volume is very useful supplement. It includes, among other things, letters of inevitably varying interest, some useful material on Georges Kopp, an interesting obituary of H.G. Wells, and Davison’s own thoughts on the notorious ‘list’ that Orwell handed over to the Information Research Department (IRD) in 1949. As Davison insists, ‘what Orwell was doing . . . was simply helping to select those who might be trusted to write on Britain’s behalf and listing those who, in his opinion, were not to be trusted to do this’. Davison goes on to look more closely at the case of J.B. Priestley, someone he personally admired. He was ‘shocked’ by Orwell’s doubts regarding Priestley, but goes on to acknowledge that in 1946 Priestley had published his Russian Journey, a book that showed ‘he had been totally duped by what he had seen in Russia’(209). While the current writer would disagree with Davison over whether or not Orwell should have had any involvement with the IRD, there is no doubt that he is absolutely right both regarding the nature of that involvement and the fact that those on the list were people who, at the time and whatever other virtues they may have had, were apologists for the Soviet Union. Indeed, one of them, Peter Smollett, the head of the Ministry of Information’s Russian section, was an actual NKVD agent and had almost certainly been instrumental in persuading Jonathan Cape not to publish Animal Farm. Indeed, one of Orwell’s justifications for compiling his list of ‘unreliable’ people was that ‘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’ (211). It has to be insisted, though, that Orwell’s involvement with the IRD did not mean that he was a supporter of some British version of McCarthyism. He was actively opposed to any such development up until his death. While Davison’s volume is a welcome addition to our knowledge of George Orwell, what of the other volumes under review? At the very least they indicate that interest in Orwell has not declined since the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states. More importantly, they are all worthwhile contributions, demonstrating both that old arguments can be profitably revisited and that there is still new ground to be broken. Stephen Ingle’s The Social and Political Thought of George Orwell is a revisiting of old arguments; indeed it is his second book on Orwell, but none the worse for that. Whereas his earlier political biography was somewhat narrow in outlook, this new volume is a much more generous, expansive and accomplished account. The most impressive discussion is Ingle’s account of Orwell and the British working class. When Orwell made his journey north in 1936, he made, according to Ingle, ‘a profound discovery . . . the people of this abyss possessed a value system that he came greatly to admire’ (55). Orwell discovered working class ‘decency’, a set of values of which ‘the most durable characteristic . . . was its equality’ which ‘was deeply rooted in working class family life’ (56). This was a decisive moment. For Ingle, Orwell’s socialism was ‘rooted in the myth of working class decency’. He goes on that Orwell was always concerned ‘to articulate socialism as a way of life, a value system, rather than an ideology’ (58).

Newsinger

893

From this account, it might appear that Orwell’s attitude towards the working class was overly romantic, an embrace of ‘myth’. Indeed, a criticism of Ingle’s book is that he does not adequately explore the extent to which Orwell recognized that the British working class did not have a socialist consciousness. Orwell was well aware, for example, of the extent to which the working class had responded to the deprivations and hardships of the 1930s by developing ‘a culture of consolation’. He certainly recognizes that most working-class men and women had been unconcerned about the fate of the Spanish Republic, a cause for which he was to nearly lay down his life. Despite this, as late as 1949, Orwell could still write in Nineteen Eighty Four that hope lay with the proles. Winston Smith, Orwell’s protagonist, realizes what Orwell himself had grasped back in 1936: ‘What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself’. The proles ‘were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another. They had stayed human’ (74). Winston goes on to confront the problem that had engaged Orwell himself for over a decade: how could the working class develop socialist consciousness? As he puts it in the novel: ‘Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious’ (74). As Ingle points out, Orwell thought/hoped that the way out of this dilemma lay with ‘the middling people’ throwing in their lot with the working class (115). And, of course, in Nineteen Eighty Four it is Oceana’s middling group, not the proles, who are the principal victims of Big Brother’s terrorist regime. Ingle does not, however, adequately recognize the central position that hostility to Stalinism came to occupy in Orwell’s thinking, the extent to which, for Orwell, all the political controversies ‘really circle around this question’.2 This is not to say that Orwell became a ‘Stalinophobe’, sacrificing all other loyalties, beliefs and commitments on the altar of hostility to the Soviet Union. He was never to abandon the Left and go over to Conservatism as many others did. Instead, his critique of Stalinism remained situated within the parameters set by anarchist and Trotskyist accounts of the Russian Revolution and of the Soviet Union. Animal Farm, for example, is not a rejection of revolution, but the betrayal of the revolution. Ingle is completely wrong when he describes the book as an attack on ‘the sacred cow of revolution itself’, on ‘the whole enterprise of revolution’ (110). Indeed, Orwell himself made this absolutely clear in a letter he wrote to Dwight Macdonald in December 1946.3 As far as Orwell was concerned the horrors of Stalinism did not discredit socialism, but rather showed that the Soviet Union was not socialist. From this point of view, Orwell can be best seen as a ‘literary Trotskyist’, that is as someone who was influenced by Trotskyist ideas (in particular, I would argue, the theory of bureaucratic collectivism developed in opposition to Trotsky himself by Max Schachtman, James Burnham and Dwight Macdonald), but who nevertheless remained 2 3

G. Orwell, The Complete Works 11: Facing Unpleasant Facts 1937–1939 (London 1998), 159. G. Orwell, The Complete Works 1: Smothered Under Journalism 1946 (London 1998), 507.

894

Journal of Contemporary History 48(4)

extremely critical of Trotskyism as a political current. He was a ‘literary Trotskyist’ in the same way that the American journal, Partisan Review, can be legitimately regarded as a’Literary Trotskyist’ publication in the late 1930s and early 1940s. More important, the influence of Trotskyist ideas on Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four is really undeniable.4 Ben Clarke’s Orwell in Context is another book that revisits old terrain. He focuses on ‘the myths’ that Orwell constructed around the notions of ‘the Proletariat’, ‘the English People’ and ‘Masculinity’. He emphasizes quite correctly that Orwell’s ideas were ‘interventions in a variety of contemporary debates rather than . . . the isolated product of individual consciousness or ‘‘genius’’’ (2). His discussion of class is similar to Ingle in the way that he sees Orwell’s ‘Myth of the Proletariat’ as one of the foundations for his socialism. While he has much to say that is of interest about class, the most challenging section of the book is his discussion of ‘Masculinity’. He emphasizes Orwell’s hostility to feminism, insisting that his anti-feminism is demonstrated by his female characters’ support for the established social order. Resistance to capitalism was, for Orwell, a ‘masculine prerogative’ (68). Indeed, Clarke goes so far as to argue that Orwell’s anti-feminism and homophobia were actually ‘inscribed within’ his socialist politics (97). Here, Clarke follows the critique first advanced by Daphne Patai in her The Orwell Mystique over 20 years ago.5 Clarke is to be wholeheartedly congratulated for venturing onto the terrain opened up by Patai. Her book remains one of the most important and most neglected contributions to Orwell studies. The problem is that too often he reproduces the weaknesses in her argument. Without any doubt, Orwell held what can be legitimately described as sexist or masculinist attitudes, but these have to be put in the context of the time. The great majority of men (and women), including those on the Left, shared these prejudices. Clarke chronicles Orwell’s prejudices to good effect (although I have reservations about labelling him as a homophobe), but they are presented as an indictment, rather than seen as something to be explained. Indeed, one can go so far as to say that he treats Orwell’s masculinism as if it were ‘the isolated product of individual consciousness or ‘‘genius’’’. This failure to adequately contextualize is demonstrated in his discussion of Orwell and the Spanish Civil War. Here we are told that Orwell’s account ‘reinforces a conventional ideal of masculinity, founded upon such qualities as physical courage and endurance’. Is it Orwell’s account that reinforces conventional masculinity or, as seems more likely, is it the realities of combat that Orwell participated in and which he chronicles? Clarke comes perilously close to suggesting that Orwell was in Spain expressing his masculinism rather than fighting fascism. It is, of course, worth noting that fighting fascism actually did require physical courage and endurance. And if his concern had been with masculinity, why was he not fighting on the other side which had a far more reactionary attitude towards gender? I would also argue 4 5

See J. Newsinger, Orwell’s Politics (Basingstoke 1999), 117–19, 124–8. D. Patai, The Orwell Mystique (Amherst 1986).

Newsinger

895

that there is not enough evidence to describe Orwell as a homophobe. Certainly, he used homophobic abuse against opponents on occasions, which is objectionable, but his opposition to these people derived from their politics rather than their sexual preferences. It was their politics that was his primary concern, not their sexuality, whereas if he had been a homophobe their sexuality would have been the cause of his hostility. Clarke’s book is least convincing when it comes to considering Orwell’s own foremost concern: the threat that Stalinism posed to the Left. His weakest chapter is his discussion of Totalitarianism, which treats Orwell’s stand as if it were a literary rather than a political intervention. When it comes to Nineteen Eighty Four’s gender politics, he once again repeats Patai’s mistaken analysis. Julia is, of course, a much stronger character than Winston Smith, who, along with all of Orwell’s other male protagonists, is hardly an exemplar of triumphant masculinism. But her rebellion is dismissed as ‘peripheral’ (69). On the contrary, the revolt against sexual repression is one of the central themes of the novel. No one, as far as I am aware, has yet accused Stalin of trying to abolish the orgasm. Orwell introduces this particular theme independently of the book’s concern with Stalinism. A good case can be made that Orwell uses the book to mount a powerful assault on the double standard in sexual relations, an assault all the more impressive when one considers when it was written. Under the impact of the changes in gender relations occasioned by the Second World War, Orwell was rethinking his attitudes. Whatever disagreements one might have with aspects of Clarke’s approach, there is much of interest in his book, and he is to be congratulated on reopening discussion of issues of gender and masculinity. Orwell in Context is a challenging book that is essential reading for all students of George Orwell. A book that truly breaks exciting new ground is Philip Bounds’ Orwell and Marxism. The first point to make here is that the title is somewhat misleading. The book does not explore Orwell’s relationship with the varieties of Marxism that were on offer in the 1930s and 1940s, but rather focuses on his relationship with Marxist cultural theory, more particularly the cultural theory developed by the Communist Party in the 1930s. While a study of Orwell’s relationship with the Marxisms of his day would be of inestimable value, Bounds’ narrower concerns still produce exciting results. Of particular interest is his all too brief discussion of Orwell’s relations with the Adelphi magazine. Orwell went from using it for target practice in Burma to becoming a regular contributor. Once back in Britain, Orwell found the Adelphi’s concern with ‘how relationships could be successfully established across class lines’ particularly congenial. He proceeded to make this concern ‘his own once he decided to make the leap from cultural radical to fully fledged socialist’ (22). It is a great pity that Bounds does not devote more attention to the politics of the Adelphi. Indeed, it is a serious gap in the literature on the Left in the 1930s that we do not have any definitive study of the magazine and its influence. To be fair to Bounds, however, this is not the study that he set out to write.

896

Journal of Contemporary History 48(4)

The most interesting section of Orwell and Marxism, for this reader, is his discussion of Orwell’s relationship with the work of the Communist Party’s literary intellectuals. He makes a very strong case for recognizing that Orwell was engaged in a critical dialogue with those Communist intellectuals who were concerned during the Popular Front period (1935–9) with exploring and making their own an English radical tradition. As he observes, ‘Orwell’s writings on Englishness were often strikingly similar to those of the Communists’. Indeed, he goes so far as to argue that ‘texts such as The Lion and the Unicorn can be reasonably interpreted as a critical response to the communist orthodoxy’ (53). One problem with Bounds’ approach is that he has a tendency to write as if the relationship between Orwell and the Communists was a scholarly one, as if their disagreements were those of the academy. While relations between academics can sometimes become extremely antagonistic, Orwell could be confident that his Communist opponents would quite cheerfully have seen him arrested, confess and executed. This is not an exaggeration. These people not only supported the Moscow Trials and remained silent about the Great Terror, but they also stood by while one of their own comrades, Rose Cohen, disappeared into the Gulag. If he had fallen into the hands of the Soviet secret police in Spain, Orwell had little doubt that he would have been killed. Bounds’ account would have benefited from more awareness that at this time the politics of literature could be a matter of life and death. Another point worth making here is that Bounds does not take enough account of the ferocity of Orwell’s hostility to the Popular Front, which he regarded as little more than class collaboration in pursuit of Russian foreign policy objectives. And, of course, in the summer of 1939 there was the Hitler–Stalin Pact. When Orwell wrote The Lion and the Unicorn, it is most unlikely that he was responding to any Popular Front influence because by now the Communist Party was anti-war, defeatist and, on occasions, pro-Nazi. Instead, The Lion and the Unicorn can better be seen as Orwell’s attempt to adapt the politics of the POUM to what he believed was a developing revolutionary situation in Britain in 1940–1. Bounds is much more convincing when he suggests the likelihood that Alick West influenced Orwell’s thinking about detective fiction and that Charles Madge influenced his thinking on Donald McGill. Orwell’s essays on Dickens and Swift, he insists, ‘can be read as direct responses to communist writings on English literary radicalism’; indeed, he argues that Orwell’s famous essay on Dickens ‘came perilously close to plagiarising a book by T.A. Jackson’ (116). He is particularly critical of Orwell’s assault on W.H. Auden, which he describes, with considerable justification, as ‘probably the most unfair of his career – not least because one of the poems he cited in support of it was actually written by C. Day Lewis!’ (141). Certainly, he makes a convincing case that Orwell was impressed by Communist literary critics, ‘by their critical insight and their use of Marxism as a tool of historical analysis’. Once again, though, he diminishes Orwell’s hostility to these people. Orwell was afraid, he writes, that ‘their demand for politically committed art would ultimately have a ruinous effect on literary standards’. This is true as far

Newsinger

897

as it goes, but Orwell’s understanding of the threat posed by Stalinism went much further. One other point, one can only wish Bounds had gone on to look at the relatively neglected transatlantic influence on Orwell’s thinking, in particular his relationship with Partisan Review, and most especially with Dwight Macdonald. He seems ideally equipped for the task. What is particularly important about Bounds’ work, however, is the way that it points the way forward for Orwell studies. He shows that the way to a deeper understanding is to explore the various milieu in which he moved, the intellectual currents that influenced him and his intellectual relationships with specific individuals whose work impacted on him (Franz Borkenau springs immediately to mind in this regard).6 Which brings us to Daniel Leab’s study of one particular aspect of Orwell’s posthumous career: working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Orwell Subverted explores the CIA’s involvement in the making of Halas and Batchelor’s animated film of Animal Farm. The film had its world premieres in New York on 29 December 1954 and a fortnight later in London on 13 January 1955. Leab provides us with an exhaustive and absolutely compelling account of the CIA’s role in bringing this about. While Orwell remained a socialist up until his death, both the CIA and the IRD made use of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four as propaganda weapons in the Cold War. The IRD even produced a comic strip version of Animal Farm which it tried to place in newspapers in as many different countries as possible. Was this a case of Orwell’s work being hijacked or was it merely a matter of them putting his work to the use for which it had been intended? As we have seen, Orwell was certainly a determined and uncompromising opponent of Stalinism, and he had shortly before his death assisted the IRD. Nevertheless, his intention in writing both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty Four had always been, primarily, with combating the influence of Stalinism over the Left. In the hands of the CIA and the IRD, his books became a weapon to be used not just against the Soviet Union and the Communists, but against the Left itself, indeed against the very beliefs that Orwell had himself championed and had hoped to rescue from Stalinism. In this sense, his work was certainly ‘subverted’. The best demonstration of this is provided by the changes that the CIA insisted had to be made to Joy Batchelor’s script, which had remained faithful to the book. Joseph Bryan, the CIA’s liaison with the production team, told them that ‘the investors’ were ‘greatly concerned that Snowball . . . was still presented too sympathetically’. They particularly objected to the implication that if Snowball had defeated Napoleon ‘he might have succeeded in ‘‘creating a benevolent, successful state . . . this implication we cannot permit’’’ (79). Instead, Snowball had to be shown as a ‘fanatic intellectual whose plans if carried through would have led to disaster no less complete than under Napoleon’. They also insisted that the film 6 Another recent important study along these lines is K. Bluemel, George Orwell and the Radical Eccentrics (Basingstoke 2004).

898

Journal of Contemporary History 48(4)

make clear that not all farmers were bad, only Farmer Jones, and that on other farms the animals were well looked after and were content with their lot. And, related to this, the celebrated scene, where the farm animals look through the farm window and cannot tell the pigs from the men or the men from the pigs, had to be changed. Instead, this crucial scene had to show only that the pigs were no different from Farmer Jones. The film also had to show the farm animals getting ready to overthrow their oppressors, part of the CIA’s commitment to ‘Rollback’. Clearly the film was to be drained of any remnant of Orwell’s socialist politics, with only his anti-Stalinism remaining. The story was transformed, in best Ministry of Truth style, into Cold War propaganda. What is important is that the book’s political integrity had to be violated in the process.7 Orwell, as we can see, has had a very active life after death.8

Biographical Note John Newsinger is Professor of Modern History at Bath Spa University and author of Orwell’s Politics. A new edition of The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire has just been published and he is working on a new edition of British Counterinsurgency for Palgrave.

7 See also T. Shaw, Hollywood’s Cold War (Edinburgh 2007), 72–92. 8 For a particularly interesting account of Orwell’s posthumous Spanish career see A. Lazaro, ‘George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia: A Politically Incorrect Story’, in A. Lazaro (ed.) The Road From George Orwell: His Achievement and Legacy (Bern 2001). See also various books by John Rodden, in particular, The Politics of Literary Reputation: The Making and Claiming of St George Orwell (Oxford 1989); Scenes From An Afterlife: The Legacy of George Orwell (Wilmington, DE 2003) Every Intellectual’s Big Brother: George Orwell’s Literary Siblings (Austin, TX 2006).