Dear George. . . Yours Morgan

Ferdinand Mount

Orwell: The War Broadcasts Edited by W. J. West (Duckworth/BBC £12.50) 'I cr believe that the BBC, in spite of the believe of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful.' Addicts will instantly recog- nise the old mixture — as strong and unchanging as the smell of Woodbines and armpits in the Tube. This is Orwellian in the unfrightening sense: the muscular ego, the bald, direct statement, the brutal abuse and, summing up, the plonking truth judg- ment. There have been accounts of Orwell at the BBC before, by his colleague John Morris, and by Sir William Empson; but none, I think, can hope to convey the full pungency of the encounter as this collec- tion does. It is a ragbag of odds and ends from the BBC archives, admirably edited and introduced, and includes half a dozen of Orwell's own radio talks, several intro- ductions to other people's, four playlets adapted by Orwell from stories by Anatole France, Silone, Wells and Hans Andersen ('The Emperor's New Clothes' — which naturally and illogically makes one visual- ise Orwell, gaunt, tubercular and naked, as the Emperor), and letters he sent in his capacity as Talks Assistant to the Indian Section, and some interesting appendices on censorship and propaganda during the war, including delightful memos such as:

From: Controller (Overseas Services) Subject: Mr Kingsley Martin's talk July 30th To: Eastern Services Director . . . Blair, in consulting A.C. (H) seemed to show scant respect for the natural courtesy and discipline appropriate to an organisation such as ours over some points that were raised by A.C. (H).

Some of the letters quoted do not much advance human knowledge; for example:

Dear Mr Bowyer, Very many thanks for the copy of The Future of British Air Transport, which I shall read with great interest.

Yours sincerely, George Orwell

On the other hand, other apparent trivia vibrate with the resonance of period and character:

Dear Forster, I am sorry to ask such a thing, but I wonder if you would be kind enough to refund the cost of the book you lost — Arthur Ponsonby by Henry Ponsonby. It was 12/6d. Apparently the Times Book Club hold us responsible and expect us to pay the price for the new copy.

The correspondence with E. M Forster, a frequent contributor to Orwell's pro- grammes and an ideal one for the kind of Indian audience — small and pinkish — that they were likely to receive, sounds somewhat uneasy, in spite of the fact that it had to do with practical, straightforward' matters. Forster starts off in April 1942: 'Dear Mr Orwell . . . Yours -sincerely, E. , M. Forster.' Orwell replies in kind. By June, Forster ventures to open: 'Dear George Orwell', and close 'Yours, E. M. Forster.' Orwell stonewalls: 'Dear Mr Forster. . Yours, George Orwell.' Forster retreats to 'Dear Mr Orwell.' But in August, he has another go. With unen- couraged daring, he writes 'Dear George . . . Yours, Morgan.' This does not go down well. Orwell relents only as far as 'Dear Forster . . . Yours, George Orwell.' Forster takes the hint immediately and replies 'Dear Orwell . . . E. M. Forster.' And there the relationship sticks.

It might be tempting to write all this off as the inconsistencies of busy literary men in wartime who cannot quite remember what terms they are on. Yet there is something marked and characteristic about this instability of address; Orwell writes equally `Dear Cyril' and 'Dear Connolly' to a lifelong friend; seems to sign himself either 'Blair' or 'Orwell' as the mood takes him. These thing leave their mark on other people, too. John Morris, clearly quite a prickly character himself, had asked Orwell to meet a mutual acquaintance, L. H. Myers, the rather mystical novelist who was rich enough to have paid for Orwell to take a convalescent holiday in Morocco and had had Orwell to stay before the war. Orwell refused to dine with them, but agreed to meet them after dinner and turned up in his usual shabby clothes, twitted them with having dined at Boules- tin's, then made a very sticky evening of it by refusing to speak. The next day, when he saw Morris in the office, 'he addressed me as he had not done for many months, by my surname, and on those terms we remained until he left'.

In another mood, of course, the vagaries of usage of Christian name and surname among different classes and ages would have amused Orwell and tweaked a grace- ful and funny esay out of him. The puritan mask was by turns playful, even self- mocking, bitter and hectoring. One must not underestimate the amount of fun he was having.

In his radio talks, he revels in austerity and rationing. The British people eat a better diet and live a healthier life because of wartime restrictions. They are out walk- ing and skating, instead of sitting by the fire eating chocolates. 'Women who in peacetime might have been sitting in the cinematograph are now sitting at home knitting socks and helmets for Russian soldiers. Before the war there was every incentive for the general public to be wasteful, at least so far as their means allowed . . . We have had to learn to simplify our lives and fall back more and more on the resources of our own minds instead of on synthetic pleasures manufac- tured for us in Hollywood or by the makers of silk stockings, alcohol and chocolates.' It is curious to hear him talk of 'the wasteful years before the war' — lamenting the Thirties as the Years of Plenty, which of course they were, for much of Southern England at least.

Even as ringmaster of his radio poetry magazine Voice, Orwell feels it necessary to defend himself against the charge of being 'highbrow' and 'dilettante' by point- ing out that poetry on the air 'can't be described as a wasteful form of entertain- ment', going on to say, more boldly, that 'there are some of us who feel that it is exactly at times like the present that literature ought not to be forgotten'. He runs these programmes in a severe but not unsympathetic way. When, for example, Stevie Smith proposes to start a program- me on childhood with Wordsworth's 'In- timations of Immortality', Orwell says brusquely 'That's too long' and tells Her- bert Read to read Blake's 'Holy Thursday' instead. Thoprogrammes may seem a little stagey by our standards, and one may doubt whether any presenter today would say, as Orwell does on one occasion, 'We're lucky in having a Negro writer with us in the studio today'. And yet I feel most of the time how much I would like to have heard the programmes — despite the fact that Orwell's voice was thought by his colleagues to be flat and dull. How many modern arts programmes would one feel the same hankering to hear again?

It is clear that Orwell rather liked the BBC. Six months after leaving it, in 1943, he wrote in Tribune: 'I repeat what I said before that in my experience the BBC is relatively truthful and, above all, does not disseminate lies simply because they are "newsy": True, he had complained to Rayner Heppenstall just before he left: 'At present I am just an orange that has been trodden on by a very dirty boot.' But that sounds more like anyone bitching about office life translated into Orwellese. And in dealing with the myriads of Controllers and Assistant Controllers at the BBC, let alone with the censors both there and in the Ministry of Information (which must be the model for the Ministry of Truth in 1984 and not the BBC, which provided only the material for the odd setting, such as the canteen), Orwell seems to have been well able to take care of himself. The legend of ' the awkward, solitary moralist needs a little nuancing.

He had, of course, the familiar delusion of the political journalist that he is engaged in work 'which does produce some measur- able effect', but he does not seem to have been unduly agonised by the moral dilem- mas of a propagandist in wartime. He was proud of pushing, within limits, an anti- imperialist line out to his Indian listeners, but as that line corresponded — again within limits — to the principal interest of the Allies, which was to prevent disaffec- tion amongst the educated Indian popula- tion, nobody seemed to mind very much. His contributors were mostly on the left, to put it mildly: J. D. Bernal; Joseph Needham, Kingsley Martin — with Guy Burgess hovering in the wings. But pro- vided they decently muted their bias, the censors were fairly tolerant. After all, who was listening? Orwell seems to have handled these difficult characters with some tact, another sign of his worldlY competence and of his ability to get on with the sort of people he denounced elsewhere as bearded pacifists, fellow travellers and BBC nancies. And when he left the BBC, one suspects that it was not because of frustration • or censorship but simplY because he felt it was time to move on.

And despite ill-health and shouting 'For God's sake, shut up' through the thin partition wall of 200 Oxford Street, he must have enjoyed himself now and then: pouring his tea into the saucer in the canteen, crawling the BBC pubs, adapting into a radio play any story he could find which contained some element of class hatred — Wells's A Slip of the Microscope, for example; what a wonderful Gissing serial he could have scripted. Orwell did start off one of those chain radio serials — each author has to take up where the last left off — with the story of a shabby little man in a raincoat who finds his rich, upper-class enemy unconscious amid the debris of the Blitz and prepares to kill him. By the time the story has passed through the hands of L. A. G. Strong, Inez Holden and Martin Armstrong, the rich man turns out to have been converted to socialism out of a sense of guilt and fought in the Spanish Civil War — a nice joke on Orwell. In the last chapter, written by Forster, the rich man and poor man make friends and walk off together to the rich man's club for a bath — leaving behind a little pickpocket with fascist tendencies who, according to E. M. Forster, is to inherit the earth — which, I suppose, is Bloomsbury's Re- venge.