AND ANOTHER THING
Setting the record straight about George Orwell's list of Soviet stooges
PAUL JOHNSON
The sensational treatment of 'revela- tions' about George Orwell's anti-commu- nism does him an injustice. The Daily Tele- graph's headline, 'Socialist Icon Who Became an Informer', gives a completely misleading impression. Orwell never did anything secretively or. furtively. Stalin's men tried to kill him during the Spanish Civil War, and they succeeded in murdering most of his friends there. He told the truth about it all in such writings as Homage to Catalonia, some of which he had great diffi- culty in publishing, so strong was the pro- Soviet element in the British media. He never hid his passionate opposition to Stalin and all he stood for, or his desire to identify the fellow-travellers and Soviet agents who, posing as respectable members of the intel- ligentsia, worked on behalf of a totalitarian regime which had destroyed tens of millions of people. He did this openly. He sent Celia Kirwan his notes on prominent people who were or might be helping Stalin to give her guidance in her work, which was the expo- sure of Soviet lies. He asked her to keep it secret simply to avoid libel actions — lefties, Particularly the guilty ones, were remark- ably litigious. Indeed they still are. He was not being an 'informer', still less a 'govern- ment' informant', as the Telegraph put it. He Was simply an English patriot doing his duty, a golden man in an age of lead. The most intriguing name on Orwell's list is Peter Smollett, or Smolka, an Austrian communist who worked as a Soviet agent with Kim Philby in the 1930s. He was later head of the Russian section of the wartime Ministry of Information, and later still held an important position on the Times, dying unexposed in 1980. It was Smollett who suc- cessfully advised Jonathan Cape against publishing Animal Farm. This evil man was typical of a number of Soviet agents who worked in and around the British media in those dark decades, and were instrumental in preventing honest men like Orwell from getting the truth published. I would like to know more about him, and also about E.H. Carr, who also figures on Orwell's list, th°ugh as 'appeaser only'. Carr was also active behind the scenes, pushing pro- Soviet writers and blocking anti-Soviet ones. Orwell's notations are fascinating but often arguable. R.H.S. Crossman was never pro-Soviet, except by accident. Orwell says of him, Too dishonest to be outright [fel- low traveller]: Crossman was certainly dis- honest, or rather self-deceiving, but he was much too noisy to be an agent of any kind. If anything he was a Cold Warrior, as his long association with Colonel (`I'll have your guts for garters') Wigg indicates. In fact in the early 1950s he used to lecture on psychological warfare at Nato HQ near Paris, and take me out to expensive dinners on the proceeds. Orwell is wrong about J.B. Priestley too. He writes, 'Possibly has some kind of organisational tie-up [with the Sovi- et].' I am sure that is untrue. Priestley hated any kind of tie-up. He was rich enough to tell everyone to go to hell (and often did). Nor was he 'very anti-USA'. He was suspicious of power, like Orwell him- self, and of people who told him to be more `responsible'. His favourite term of abuse was 'a sound man'. 'I have never been sound,' he would growl. I am also surprised to see John Beavan on the list, though it is true I only knew him in the last 20 years of his life, when he became a Daily Mirror life peer and as `sound' as it was possible to be. I always knew him as the Steam Kettle, because as he became tipsy he began to whistle, and when thoroughly drunk came to the boil as it were, the whistling becoming continuous. A.J.P. Taylor's name was rightly included because he had some kind of sinister con- nection with E.H. Carr, whom he persis- tently rated as 'Britain's greatest living his- torian', a manifest absurdity. On the other hand, as Orwell noted, he 'took anti-CP line at the Wroclaw Conference'. This was, in its own way, a watershed event, because the Wroclaw Conference of Intellectuals in the summer of 1948, entirely organised and stage-managed by the Soviets, was the first occasion when some hitherto well-drilled Western left-wing intellectuals broke ranks. It was Taylor who led the revolt in a remarkable speech. Kingsley Martin, who also figures on Orwell's list (Decayed liber- al. Very dishonest'), described the speech and the large wen on Taylor's forehead, which he said 'blazed like a beacon, a sym- bol of the British bulldog'. Taylor took mortal offence at this personal reference, and promptly had the wen removed, so that he returned to Magdalen College that autumn without it, looking even crosser than usual, or so we, his pupils, thought.
Orwell was too generous to some people: Walter Duranty, for instance, the odious apologist for Stalin who worked for the New York Times, and the ridiculous Anna Louise Strong, who wrote a pamphlet applauding Stalin's use of slave labour, and who had, according to Malcolm 'Muggeridge, 'an expression of stupidity on her face so pro- found as to amount to a kind of beauty'. Orwell rightly guessed that it was stupidity rather than depravity which led most of the pro-Soviet stooges to do what they did. Thus Sean O'Casey is dismissed as 'very stupid' and Solly Zuckerman as 'political ignorant' (though he later acquired more savvy). Poor Stephen Spender emerges as, `Sentimental sympathiser, and very unreli- able. Easily influenced.' All this, written in 1949, was soon to be out of date, for Spender became one of the founders of Encounter and was later accused (falsely) of being a CIA agent. It is true, however, that he was sentimental and easily influenced, but that was all part of his warm, sponta- neous and soft-hearted character. He was an exceptionally nice man, one of the few to emerge from the 'low, dishonest decade' of the 1930s, and the even lower ones which followed it, the 1940s and 1950s, with a degree of innocence, enabling him to sur- vive into a serene and guiltless old age.
Oddly enough, Stephen told me a curious story about Orwell. I had often wondered why Mary McCarthy, who once admired Orwell greatly, suddenly turned on him after his death. Stephen said he once asked Orwell about his first wife, and Orwell replied, 'She wasn't a bad old stick.' For an Englishman of Orwell's upbringing, tem- perament and inhibitions, this was just about the highest form of praise. But when Spender repeated it to Mary McCarthy, she exploded into a storm of feminist rage: 'My God! That a guy could say such a thing about his own wife! I always suspected that man was a fascist!' Shortly afterwards she wrote her attack. Who says that the English language brings the British and Americans closer?
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