Here is Tim Garton Ash's Guardian article from last week
Alan Allport
long been speculation about a list of communist sympathisers Orwell was said
to have passed to the British secret services. In the week of the writer's
centenary, Timothy Garton Ash exclusively reveals the list has been found
and tells the story behind Orwell's alleged collaboration.
To mark his hundredth birthday, next Wednesday, George Orwell sends us an
eerie greeting. Reproduced here, for the first time, is a copy of the list
that he despatched from his sickbed on May 2 1949 to a close friend, Celia
Kirwan, who had recently begun work at a semi-secret department of the
Foreign Office. It contains 38 names of journalists, writers and actors who,
as he had written to Celia on April 6, "in my opinion are crypto-communists,
fellow-travellers or inclined that way and should not be trusted as
propagandists". Anti-communist propagandists, that is, in the burgeoning
cold war.
The list includes Charlie Chaplin, JB Priestley and the actor Michael
Redgrave, all marked with "??", implying doubt as to whether they really
were crypto-communists or fellow-travellers. EH Carr, the historian of
international relations and Soviet Russia, is dismissed as "Appeaser only".
The editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, an old bete noire of
Orwell's, gets the gloriously back-handed "?? Too dishonest to be outright
'crypto' or fellow-traveller, but reliably pro-Russian on all major issues".
Beside them are many lesser-known writers and journalists, starting with an
industrial correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, described as "Probably
sympathiser only. Good reporter. Stupid." Over the last decade, speculation
about "Orwell's List" has sustained many articles with lurid headlines such
as "socialist icon who became an informer," "Big Brother of the FO" and "How
Orwell's blacklist aided Secret Service". All this speculative denunciation
of the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four has been based on three very
incomplete sources: the publication of many (but not all) entries from the
strictly private notebook in which Orwell attempted to identify "cryptos"
and "FTs" (his abbreviation for fellow- traveller); his published
correspondence with Celia Kirwan; and the partial release seven years ago of
the relevant files from the cryptically named Information Research
Department (IRD) of the Foreign Office. But in file FO 1110/189 a card was
inserted, next to a copy of Orwell's letter to Kirwan of April 6 1949,
saying a document had been withheld. It seems reasonable to assume that this
document was a copy of Orwell's letter of May 2 , saying he enclosed "a list
with about 35 names", and, most important, the list itself.
There the matter rested, with Her Majesty's Government solicitously guarding
Orwell's last secret, until shortly after Celia Kirwan's death last autumn,
when her daughter, Ariane Bankes, found this document among her mother's
papers, and subsequently asked me to write about it. Professor Peter
Davison, editor of Orwell's Complete Works , has no doubt of its
authenticity. On three pages of old-fashioned foolscap paper, it appears to
be a carbon copy of a document that is presumably still lying in some
Foreign Office vault. Professor Davison tells me that the typeface is not
that of Orwell's typewriter, so it may have been typed up from Orwell's
original (handwritten?) list by someone in the IRD, but it accurately
reproduces Orwell's characteristic misspelling of "Aberystwith". The
comments are very close to those in the original notebook, but he has
slightly reworded some of them. Several names are published here for the
first time, including that of the well-known novelist Naomi Mitchison -
"Silly sympathiser. Sister of JBS Haldane".
There remains a small mystery about when and how Celia Kirwan received this
copy of the list originally sent to her in 1949, and who wrote across it, in
red ink "NOT RELEASED". We have a couple of clues: the document was found in
a file of papers dating mainly from the 1990s; next to it was a copy of part
of the Foreign Office file marked, in the same hand, "Extract from FO
1110/189". Since these papers only received the class code FO 1110 in
February 1994, this strongly suggests that the list was passed back to Celia
Kirwan at a time when the IRD papers were being prepared by Foreign Office
archivists and weeders for their partial release in 1996.
SO THERE is the text. What is the context? In February 1949, George Orwell
was lying in a sanatorium in the Cotswolds, very ill with the TB that would
kill him within a year. That winter he had worn himself out in a last effort
to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four , his bleak warning of what might happen to
Britain if totalitarianism won here. He was lonely after his wife's death in
1945, despairing of his own wasted health, at the age of just 45, and deeply
pessimistic about the advance of Russian communism, whose cruelty and
treachery he had personally experienced, nearly at the cost of his own life,
in Barcelona during the Spanish civil war. The communists had just taken
over Czechoslovakia and they were now blockading West Berlin.
He believed there was a war on, a "cold war". He feared that we were losing
this war. One reason we were losing, he thought, was that public opinion had
been blinded to the true nature of Soviet communism by a combination of
understandable gratitude for the Soviet Union's immense role in defeating
Nazism and a poisonous assemblage, among the writers, journalists and
academics who wrote what the general public read, saw and heard, of naive
and sentimental admirers of the Soviet system, declared Communist Party (CP)
members, covert ("crypto-") communists, and paid-up Soviet spies. It was
these people, he suspected, who had made it so difficult for him to get his
anti-Soviet fairy tale Animal Farm published in the last year of the last
war.
However, he also knew this was a time in which genuine, idealistic believers
in communism were becoming disgusted by what they saw. These converts were
especially important to anti-communist leftists like Orwell who wanted to
rescue the ideals of democratic socialism from the fatal embrace of Soviet
communism. So at some point in the mid-to-late 1940s he had started keeping
a private notebook in which he tried to work out who was what: outright CP,
agent, "FT", sentimental sympathiser. . .
The notebook, which I have been able to consult in the Orwell Archive at
University College, London, shows that he really worked and worried away at
this. It contains entries in biro, pen and pencil, with asterisks in red and
blue against some names. There are 135 names in all, of which 10 have been
crossed out, either because the person had died - like F La Guardia, the
mayor of New York - or because Orwell had decided they were not
crypto-communists or fellow-travellers. Thus, for example, the name of the
historian AJP Taylor is crossed out, with Orwell's heavily underlined remark
"Took anti-CP line at Wroclaw Conference". . The way Orwell agonised over
his individual assessments is shown by the entry on JB Priestley, which has
against it a red asterisk, crossed out with black cross-hatching, and then
encircled in blue with an added question-mark.
To this depressed and mortally ill political writer of genius there came, in
February 1949, a delightful piece of personal news. Celia Kirwan (nee Paget)
had returned to London from Paris. Celia was a strikingly beautiful and
vivacious young woman who moved in left-wing literary circles, as did her
twin sister Mamaine, who was married to Orwell's friend Arthur Koestler.
Orwell had met Celia when they spent Christmas together with Arthur and
Mamaine in 1945. They got on very well, and met again. In January 1946, he
sent her a passionate letter, full of tender feeling and rather clumsily
proposing either marriage or an affair. It ended "good night my dearest
love, George". Celia gently refused him but they remained close friends.
"Dearest Celia," he now wrote from the Cotswold Sanatorium on February 13,
"how delightful to get your letter and know that you are in England again".
"I will send you a copy of my new book (i.e. Nineteen Eighty-Four ) when it
comes out (about June I think), but I don't think you'll like it; it's an
awful book really." Saying he hopes to see her "some time, perhaps in the
summer" he signs off "with much love, George".
Sooner than expected, Celia came down to Gloucestershire to visit him, on
March 29; but she came also with a mission. She was working for this new
department of the Foreign Office, trying to counter the assault waves of
communist propaganda emanating from the Cominform. Could he help? As she
records in her official memorandum of their meeting, Orwell "expressed his
whole-hearted and enthusiastic approval of our aims". He couldn't write
anything himself, he said, because he was too ill and didn't like to write
"on commission", but he suggested several people who might. On April 6, he
follows up with a letter in his neat, rather delicate handwriting,
suggesting a few more names and offering his list of those "who should not
be trusted as propagandists. But for that I shall have to send for a
notebook which I have at home, and if I do give you such a list it is
strictly confidential, as I imagine it is libellous to describe someone as a
fellow-traveller."
Celia circulates the letter to her superior, Adam Watson, who makes some
comments, then adds "PS Mrs Kirwan should certainly ask Mr Orwell for the
list of crypto-communists. She would 'treat it with every confidence' and
send it back after a day or two. I hope the list gives reasons in each
case." Mrs Kirwan does as she is asked, writing from "Foreign Office, 17
Carlton House Terrace" on April 30: "Dear George, Thank you so much for your
helpful suggestions. My department were very interested to see them . . .
They have asked me to say that they would be very grateful if you could let
us look at your list of fellow-travelling and crypto journalists: we would
treat it with the utmost discretion." Her greeting is cooler than his:
"Yours ever, Celia".
Meanwhile, he has asked his old friend Richard Rees to send him the notebook
from the remote house on the Scottish island of Jura where he had written
Nineteen Eighty-Four . Thanking him for it, on April 17 , he writes: "(GDH.)
Cole I think should probably not be on the list but I would be less certain
of him than of (Harold) Laski in case of war . . . The whole business is
very tricky, and one can never do more than use one's judgment and treat
each case individually." So we must imagine him lying in his sanatorium bed,
gaunt and wretched, going through the notebook, perhaps adding a blue
question-mark to the red asterisk and black cross-hatching on Priestley,
wondering how Cole or Laski would behave in the event of a real, shooting
war with the Soviet Union - and which of the 135 names to pass on to Celia.
On receiving her note, he writes back at once, enclosing his list of 38: "It
isn't very sensational and I don't suppose it will tell your friends
anything they don't know." (Note the reference to "your friends"; Orwell had
no illusion that this was just going to her.) "At the same time it isn't a
bad idea to have the people who are probably unreliable listed. If it had
been done earlier 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. Even as it stands, I imagine that this list is very
libellous, or slanderous, or whatever the term is, so will you please see
that it is returned to me without fail." Signed "with love, George".
At this point, maddeningly, the paper trail goes cold. We know that Celia
Kirwan was supposed to come to see him on the next Sunday and that he
thanked her on May 13 for sending a bottle of brandy. Did she return the
list when/if she went to visit him again, having had this copy typed up in
the department? What did they say at that meeting, if it took place? What
happened next? Were these names handed on to anyone else? We don't know. One
reason we don't know is that the Foreign Office, in the tradition of
unhealthy and unnecessary secrecy that still plagues British government,
continues to withhold the original document, as well as other IRD files that
could cast more light on this mysterious department's links with the secret
services and the BBC.
Until they do, we have to work with what we have. In the last few weeks I
have talked to several former members of the IRD at that time. They include
Adam Watson, the official who instructed Celia Kirwan to ask Orwell for his
list; Robert Conquest, the veteran chronicler of Soviet terror, who
subsequently shared an office with Celia Kirwan and himself fell "madly in
love" with her; and the aptly named Mr John Cloake. The picture that emerges
is of a strange, ill-defined outfit, with a diverse bunch of people fumbling
their way from the recently finished war against fascist totalitarianism, in
which most of them had fought, into the new "cold" war against the communist
totalitarianism of Britain's recent wartime ally. It was a semi-secret
department. Unlike MI6, whose very existence was denied by the government,
IRD appears in the Foreign Office list but much of its funding came from the
Secret Vote. An internal Foreign Office description from 1951 says "it
should be noted that the name of this department is intended as a disguise
for the true nature of its work, which must remain confidential".
In the beginning, that "true nature" was mainly to gather reliable
information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it, often
in the form of pre-cooked articles supplied anonymously to the media, and to
fund anti-communist publications by authors including the philosopher
Bertrand Russell. However, unlike the scrupulous Conquest and Watson, other
IRD officers almost certainly did not stop there. Using methods they had
learned in the previous war, working for the cloak-and-dagger Political
Warfare Executive or MI6, they tried to combat what they saw as communist
infiltration of the trades unions, the BBC or organisations like the
National Council for Civil Liberties by tip-offs, spreading rumours - and
perhaps worse.
All the survivors insist it is most unlikely that any names supplied by
Orwell in 1949 would have been passed on to anyone else, and especially not
to MI5 or MI6. "I cannot remember any case in which we said (to MI5 or MI6)
'Did you realise that X says So-and-so is a crypto-communist?'", Adam Watson
told me. Yet clearly no one can ever know exactly what, say, the head of
department, Ralph Murray, might have muttered to an old friend from "Six"
over a brandy at the Traveller's Club, just round the corner from Carlton
House Terrace.
Celia's own view, in her old age, was robust. At the time of fevered
speculation about the list in the 1990s, when Gerald Kaufman MP was writing
in the Evening Standard that "Orwell was a Big Brother too", Celia Kirwan
(by now Celia Goodman) said "I think George was quite right to do it . . .
And, of course, everybody thinks that people were going to be shot at dawn.
The only thing that was going to happen to them was that they wouldn't be
asked to write for the Information Research Department."
Even with the release of more files, we can never conclusively prove that
she was right. But if this was Britain's McCarthyite witch-hunt, then it
looks quite amateur, scrupulous and mild by comparison with the American
McCarthyism that prompted Arthur Miller to write The Crucible and Charlie
Chaplin to flee back to Orwell's Britain.
Consider who some of the people on the list were, and what happened to them.
Peter Smollett - "gives strong impression of being some kind of Soviet
agent. Very slimy person" - was singled out by Orwell for special mention in
his covering letter to Celia. Born in Vienna as Peter Smolka, Smollett was
the head of the Russian section in the ministry of information during the
second world war. We now know two more things about him. First, according to
the Mitrokhin archive of KGB doc uments, Smollett-Smolka actually was a
Soviet agent, recruited by Kim Philby, with the codename "ABO". Second, he
was almost certainly the official on whose advice Jonathan Cape turned down
Animal Farm , as an unhealthily anti-Soviet text. How, then, was this Soviet
agent persecuted by the British state? With the award of an OBE.
According to the Mitrokhin KGB papers, Tom Driberg - "Usually named as
'crypto', but in my opinion NOT reliably pro-CP" - was recruited in 1956 as
a doubtless deeply unreliable Soviet agent (codename LEPAGE), after a
compromising homosexual encounter with an agent of the KGB's Second Chief
Direc torate in a lavatory under the Metropole hotel in Moscow. Nonetheless,
he ended his life as a celebrated author and Lord Bradwell of Bradwell juxta
mare. EH Carr, Isaac Deutscher, Naomi Mitchison and JB Priestley pursued
writing careers replete with recognition - their biographies speak for
themselves. So does that of Michael Redgrave, who went on to play a leading
role, ironically enough, in the 1956 film of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
In other words, nothing bad happened to them, even when, as in the case of
Smollett, it arguably should have. We can not conclusively say that this was
true of the lesser-known writers and journalists on the list of 38. The only
case that I have yet found of something like a possible "blacklisting" is
that of Alaric Jacob. According to Mark Hollingsworth and Richard
Norton-Taylor's book Blacklist , Alaric Jacob joined the BBC monitoring
service at Caversham in August 1948, but in February 1951 was "suddenly
refused establishment rights, which meant he would receive no pension".
However, establishment and pension rights were restored shortly after his
wife (Iris Morley, who also appears on the list) died in 1953.
A two-year loss of BBC "establishment rights" is hardly Darkness at Noon or
a session with the rats in Room 101. Anyway, there is thus far no evidence
that Orwell's list had anything at all to do with the temporary blacklisting
of Alaric Jacob 20 months later.
"SAINTS should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,"
Orwell wrote of Gandhi just a few months before he sent Celia the list.
Orwell's rule must now apply to St George Orwell, the patron saint of
English journalism. Yet even when all possible files are released, his
"innocence" can never finally be proven. Perhaps Orwell would anyway not
want to plead innocent but rather growl "guilty as charged". It all depends
on the charge.
If the charge is that Orwell was a cold warrior, the answer is plainly yes.
Orwell was a cold warrior before the cold war began, warning against the
danger of Soviet totalitarianism in Animal Farm as most people still
celebrated our heroic Soviet ally. He appears in the Oxford English
Dictionary as the first writer ever to use the term "cold war" in English.
He had fought with a gun in his hand against fascism in Spain, and got a
bullet through his throat. He would fight communism with his typewriter, and
hasten his death by the exertion.
If the charge is that he was a secret police informer, the answer is plainly
no. IRD was a rum cold war outfit, but it was nothing like a Thought Police.
Unlike that dreadful genius Bertolt Brecht, Orwell never believed that the
end justified the means. The Freedom Defence Committee, of which he was vice
chairman, thought political vetting of civil servants a necessary evil, but
insisted that the individual concerned should be represented by a trade
union, that corroborative evidence must be produced and the accused be
allowed to cross-examine those giving evidence against him. Hardly the
methods of the KGB - nor, indeed, of MI5 during the cold war.
The list invites us to reflect again on the asymmetry of our attitudes to
Nazism and communism. Orwell liked making lists. In a London Letter to
Partisan Review in 1942 he wrote "I think I could make out at least a
preliminary list of the people who would go over" to the Nazi side if the
Germans occupied England. Suppose he had. Suppose his list of crypto-Nazis
had gone to the Political Warfare Executive. Would anyone be objecting?
The long overdue publication of this document also highlights the vital
distinction between his private notebook and the list he sent to a
government department. We may, according to taste, be more shocked or amused
by the entries in his notebook. There is about them a touch of the old
imperial policeman, a hint of the spy, as well as a generous dose of his
characteristic, gruff black humour. (He includes someone from the "Income
Tax Dep't".) But all writers are spies. Auden once said that if men knew
what women said about them in private, the human race would cease to exist.
If writers' friends knew what they wrote about them in private, writers
would have few friends.
One thing that does shock our contemporary sensibility in the notebook is
his ethnic labelling of people, especially the eight variations of "Jewish?"
(Charlie Chaplin), "Polish Jew", "English Jew" or "Jewess" (Marjorie Kohn).
Orwell's whole life was a struggle to overcome the prejudices of his class
and generation; here was one he never fully overcame.
What remains unsettling about the actual list sent to Celia is the way in
which this symbol of political independence and journalistic honesty is
drawn into collaboration with a bureaucratic department of propaganda,
however marginal the collaboration, "white" the propaganda and good the
cause. In the files of the IRD, you find the kind of bureaucratic language
that we now habitually describe as Orwellian.
Orwell himself knew this kind of world from inside, and drew on it for his
"awful book". While Nineteen Eighty-Four was a warning against
totalitarianism of both the nazi (that is, National Socialist) and communist
(that is, Soviet Socialist) kind, much of the physical detail was drawn from
his experience of wartime London, working in the BBC, home to the original
Room 101.
Here we reach the most delicate and touching part of the story. There is, in
Orwell's letters to Celia, an almost painful eagerness. You feel that he was
still somewhat in love with her, or at least, that he was desperate to find
someone to love and to be loved by. Lonely, stuck in the sanatorium and
loathing the thought that he was physically done for at the age of 45, did
he yearn to combat approaching death with the love of a beautiful younger
woman? This is not to trivialise his deliberate political choice to supply
those names to a department of the Foreign Office. Nonetheless, you have to
ask yourself this question: had it been a bowler-hatted and pin-striped Mr
Cloake who came to visit him on March 29 1949, would he have offered to send
him his list? But it wasn't Mr Cloake. It was his "dearest Celia".
In Nineteen Eighty-Four , Winston Smith's protest against totalitarian
bureaucracy is to have sex with Julia - a character modelled on another
beautiful young Englishwoman, Sonia Brownell, to whom he had also proposed
marriage after his wife's death, and who did finally marry him in October
1949. In real life, his love for Celia, or at least, his quest for her
affection, brought "Mr Orwell" into the files of the British bureaucracy.
He sought desperately to fight his last enemy, death; yet it was his early
death that secured his immortality. Tempting as it is to speculate in the
light of the list about which way he would have gone if he had lived - a
cold warrior on Encounter? an iconoclastic voice on the New Statesman? -
this is strictly illegitimate. We will never know. One thing, however, is
clear: he would have taken strong political stands and therefore alienated
people on the left or the right, or probably both. Only his death allowed
everyone to beatify him in their own way. And he would have written more
books - possibly, on the form of his previous novels and last draft story,
less good ones than Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four . Untimely death
made him the James Dean of the cold war, the John F Kennedy of English
letters.
How we would all have loved to read his views on the building of the Berlin
Wall, on the Vietnam War, the 1968 protests and the final collapse of Soviet
communism in 1989, when he would have been 86. How wonderful it would be to
hear his voice today - a voice that we imagine all the more vividly because
no recording of it survives - commenting on the propaganda language of the
Iraq war, or the continuing miseries of Burma, or his partial homonym Tony
Blair. But the 100-year-old Orwell (born Eric Blair) growls across his list,
"Don't be silly. I'm dead."
Martha Bridegam
Alan Allport wrote:
> Saturday Review: Essay: Orwell's List: Love, death and treachery: There has
> long been speculation about a list of communist sympathisers Orwell was said
> to have passed to the British secret services. In the week of the writer's
> centenary, Timothy Garton Ash exclusively reveals the list has been found
> and tells the story behind Orwell's alleged collaboration.
>
> ...... Mrs Kirwan does as she is asked, writing from "Foreign Office, 17
> Carlton House Terrace" on April 30: "Dear George, Thank you so much for your
> helpful suggestions. My department were very interested to see them . . .
> They have asked me to say that they would be very grateful if you could let
> us look at your list of fellow-travelling and crypto journalists: we would
> treat it with the utmost discretion." Her greeting is cooler than his:
> "Yours ever, Celia".....
This is a shade worse than the episode had seemed: "my department were very
interested... They have asked me to say..." shows Orwell could not have
misunderstood the expectation that people other than Kirwan would see the list
& put it to whatever uses they chose.
Bummer
/M
Alan Allport
news:3EFA9590...@pacbell.net...
> This is a shade worse than the episode had seemed: "my department were
very
> interested... They have asked me to say..." shows Orwell could not have
> misunderstood the expectation that people other than Kirwan would see the
list
> & put it to whatever uses they chose.
>
> Bummer
Personally, this never struck me as a crucial point one way or the other.
Orwell had worked for government institutions and was not naive as to their
ways.
Alan.
jmc
"Alan Allport" <all...@sasdot.upenndot.edu> wrote in message
news:bde740$7g5n$1...@netnews.upenn.edu...
Thanks for the article, Alan. Very much appreciated.
I already pitched the idea to a veteran West End producer, who more or less
said that Orwell wasn't sexy enough!!!