POLITICS

To evaluate the work of Orwell, one must consider him primarily as a political writer. As he noted in his 1946 essay “Why I Write,” “What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.”¹ His writing cannot be separated from the ideology of his society and time. However valiantly his admirers might try to portray him as a writer who showed principled opposition to the faults of his own country as well as those of others, Orwell's writing reveals the signs of his upbringing and experiences working for the “establishment,” and his beliefs ultimately led him to defend the political system that he was supposedly criticizing. The final irony is that, by the end of his life, the author who portrayed the individual confronting the tyrannical state in Nineteen Eighty-four was passing information, listing individuals (including friends) who held suspect beliefs, to intelligence officers of the British government.

It is questionable whether Orwell was a socialist. There is no evidence, for example, that he ever read the work of Karl Marx or other writers who contributed to contemporary theories of socialism. His socialism may have praised the efforts and sacrifice of coal miners, condemned substandard housing, and elevated the Spanish workers to the status of heroes, but it never took the form of a coherent economic and political program to achieve a fairer system at home and abroad.

Orwell's approach toward economic problems, notably in The Road to Wigan Pier, is descriptive rather than analytical. The reader can gather that there is something amiss with an economy that could leave so many destitute, but Orwell provides nothing to explain how and why this situation has occurred. Similarly, his views on class, an essential concern in twentieth-century England, are superficial at best. While his observations of specific incidents or settings can be moving, as in The Road to Wigan Pier, his depictions of the working class are superficial, the ruling classes are little more than a specter, and no description or even understanding is shown of the economic process that has led to the deep divisions in British society. It is easy to list what Orwell was against—political orthodoxy, ill-planned industrialization, restrictions on what he could write—but, apart from his superficial exaltation of the common man, almost impossible to elucidate what he was for.

Part of the problem is that Orwell was always in political transition. He left the Indian Imperial Police with a dislike of British imperialism but he was in no way committed to the cause of Indian nationalism. He wrote of the deprivations and poor working conditions of 1930s England; however, it was only in 1936 that he embraced a vague form of socialism. Orwell did not join a political organization until 1938; when he did become a member of the Independent Labour Party, it was more from a fear of fascism than from a desire to rectify the social inequalities about which he had written. A year later, he had renounced the ILP and pacifism to become a fervent defender of England's involvement in World War II and British nationalism. During and after the war, his attention turned to the perils of the Soviet system.

Orwell covered up this weakness in his own political thought by lashing out at those who might challenge his work. The hatred undermined any progressive vision in his work. What he offered the reader was a negative conception of what was wrong with the world; the positive dimension of what could be done to remedy the situation was minimal at best. The economic answer in The Road to Wigan Pier is absent as the political remedy in Homage to Catalonia or the alternative to Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-four.

The foundation for Orwell's work was not socialism but Englishness. In 1941 he elucidated this fully in The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, a short volume seeking to define the aims of World War II. Orwell set out the task in his opening: “Above all, [England] is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time. The suet puddings and the red pillar-boxes have entered into your soul. Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side of the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.”² While Orwell set out a six-point program for his own socialism in the book, he returned to his nationalistic theme at the end: “We must add to our heritage or lose it, we must grow greater or grow less, we must go forward or backward. I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward.”³

SOCIETY

WORLD WAR I AND BEYOND: Orwell was eleven years old when World War I began in 1914. Much later, he portrayed himself as unmoved by the conflict, and in his writing he criticized the nationalism that led to the loss of so many lives. In Coming Up for Air George Bowling lectures a young Communist, arguing for war against Adolf Hitler's Germany: “In 1914, we thought it was going to be a glorious business. Well, it wasn't. It was just a bloody mess. If it comes again, you keep out of it. Why should you get your body plugged full of lead?”⁴ In fact, Orwell was a schoolboy supporter of the English cause. His first two poems, published in a local newspaper, called for volunteers and extolled the military hero Lord Kitchener. In 1917 and 1918, while at Eton College, he participated in the compulsory Officers' Training Corps and took charge of the Signal Corps, albeit with a touch of youthful rebelliousness.

THE BRITISH EMPIRE OF THE 1920s: World War I exacted an extraordinary human and financial cost, but it led to an unprecedented expansion of British political and economic influence in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. One-fifth of the land on the Earth was controlled directly or indirectly by London, and it was proudly stated that the sun never set on the British Empire. The “jewel in the crown” of this system was the Indian subcontinent, which included the province of Burma.

In Burmese Days Orwell portrays the stock villains of the imperial system, with their racism, arrogance, officiousness, and vanity, and he skillfully depicts the corrosive effects of imperialism on the decent protagonist, John Flory. Most illuminating is Orwell's portrayal of himself, not only through Flory but also through his autobiographical essays “A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant.” Unlike Down and Out in Paris and London, in which events act upon a passive narrator, Orwell in Burmese Days is an active subject and representative of British imperialism. He cannot remain a passive protagonist but must undergo a self-critique. The outcome is a more complex conception of imperialism than one finds in superficial defenses or criticisms. Orwell depicts British imperialism as both powerful and impotent, resolute and uncertain, progressive and reactionary.

Yet, one must also recognize the limitations of Orwell's portrayal of British imperialism. He crafts two detailed “native” characters to set up a clear moral choice. A local official, U Po Kyin, is the scheming villain whose pursuit of power has as its ultimate goal admission to the British whites-only club. Flory's friend Dr. Veraswami (he is not Burmese but Indian) is the innocent who is punished by U Po Kyin's treachery and Flory's cowardice. Even more troubling, the local people who rise up in opposition to British rule are portrayed as a mob who can be manipulated by U Po Kyin. Orwell may have been disturbed by the exercise of imperial power, but he shied away from presenting any alternative to it.

“A Hanging” does have passages that provide a “human” picture of the Burmese subject, notably the depiction of the condemned man carefully avoiding a puddle. The tone, however, is one of resignation to the iniquities of power rather than of any determined challenge. “Shooting An Elephant” is even more troubling. Whereas the local population is inert in “A Hanging,” in this essay they are an irrational crowd. They beseech the protection of Orwell, the British representative, against the elephant which, in heat, has trampled a bamboo hut, killed a cow, and raided some fruit stalls. Orwell may face a dilemma between “saving face” and shooting an innocent animal, but there is no indication that the Burmese are capable of assuming any responsibility.

DOWN AND OUT IN THE 1930s: By 1931 England was in a political and economic crisis. Between 1928 and 1930, unemployment doubled; eventually 25 percent of the workforce was out of a job. The Labour Party government was unable to borrow gold to defend the British currency unless it made deep cuts in social expenditure; divided over such a course of action, the government left office. A coalition government of Conservatives, Liberals, and some Labour members provided some stability, but only at the cost of sharply reduced social programs. Unemployment did not fall below 10 percent until after the outbreak of World War II.

The economic downturn particularly affected areas, including large parts of northern England, that were dependent on heavy manufacturing and activities such as coal mining. Conditions in the mines had long been a matter for discontent; wages were held down, and there was little regard for health and safety. Management's refusal to make improvements was one of the causes of the General Strike of 1926, but it collapsed in the face of government opposition.

While the graphic passages in The Road to Wigan Pier might elicit revulsion at substandard housing and unclean food and consciousness of the divide between the haves and the have-nots, it is uncertain if the book has had an impact beyond the immediate imagery. Orwell gives no indication of why the disparity in lifestyles has arisen. His poverty in Paris was due to the misfortune of the theft of his money rather than an ongoing struggle for subsistence, and it is clear that his living on the streets in London was a matter of choice rather than necessity.

Nor does Orwell offer any suggestion for a way out of this misery. His own “rescue” is due not to any significant change in the political or social system but to providence: his friend Bruno's discovery of jobs in a Paris hotel, the unidentified benefactor's payment of his return fare from France, and the offer of employment in Essex caring for a “backward boy.” Those whom Orwell has encountered, such as the “curious specimen” of a storyteller, Charlie, and the Russian refugee Boris, Orwell's “close friend for a long time,” are left behind when the narrative ends.

It was The Road to Wigan Pier that brought both the strengths and weaknesses of Orwell's emerging political vision to the fore. Many consider his portrayal, in the first of the two parts of the book, of working-class conditions as among the moving and effective criticisms of British politics and society. A 1979 study of Orwell puts the case eloquently: “In those seven chapters [are] a portrait of poverty and its consequences that catches at the imagination and awakens sympathy and anger, even now, some forty years later, when the appalling conditions it describes have long since been ameliorated—perhaps, in some slight degree, a consequence of the book itself.”⁵

Orwell's diatribe against the Left in the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier exposes his own lack of a conception to deal with the working-class situation. Describing his return to England after service in Burma, he rejects any systematic approach and espouses a vague aspiration: “I had at that time no interest in Socialism or any other economic theory. It seemed to me then—it sometimes seems to me now, for that matter—that economic injustice will stop the moment we want it to stop, and no sooner, and if we genuinely want it to stop the method adopted hardly matters.”⁶ Orwell recorded his observations of poverty and hardship in The Road to Wigan Pier, but he was unable to evaluate the causes and possible solutions for these conditions, whether of families crowded into substandard housing or of miners whose reward for courage was danger, ill health, and job insecurity.

Orwell offers no reference to such significant events as the Jarrow March of 1936, in which hundreds marched three hundred miles from northeast England to London to protest economic conditions, and he gives only a fleeting glimpse of groups such as the National Unemployed Workers' Movement, despite his recognition that “by far the best work for the unemployed is being done” by the organization. (He is far harsher about the NUWM in his diary, caricaturing a meeting as “the same sheeplike crowd—gaping girls and shapeless middle-aged women dozing over their knitting—that you see everywhere else.”)⁷

Instead, in the one hundred pages of The Road to Wigan Pier devoted to analysis of British society and politics, Orwell can only swing wildly at the Socialists. They were either “warm-hearted, unthinking” Socialists from the working class or “intellectual, book-trained” Socialists with their “soggy half-baked insincerity,” complemented by a “prevalence of cranks,” including “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”⁸ Amidst this bleak assessment, Orwell offered only a glib solution: “Different classes must be persuaded to act together without, for the moment, being asked to drop their class-differences.” Somehow, Socialism must capture the “exploited Middle Class.”⁹

ORWELL AND THE “MONEY GOD”: Keep the Aspidistra Flying, with the shrill diatribes of the protagonist, Gordon Comstock, against the “money god” and associated evils such as advertising, gave Orwell more scope for expressing his dislike of modern British life. Yet, Comstock's rantings against the materialism of London are directed not against economic or political masters but against the manifestations of mass culture, such as the disregard for quality literature, posters for “Vitamalt” and “Bovex,” and “those desolate hotels which exist all along the motor roads and are frequented by stockbrokers airing their whores on Sunday afternoons.”¹⁰ When Orwell identifies a specific target for Comstock's ridicule, it is not those who have produced this mass culture but the naive millionaire “socialist” Ravelston (a character based on Orwell's lawyer, Richard Rees), who plays at being a friend of the working class. Instead of taking the opportunity for a detailed examination of the political and economic conditions of the 1930s that contributed to unhappiness and even desperation, Orwell scored cheap points against the Left with which he was supposedly associated. The result is that the ambiguity of Comstock's decisions at the end of the novel—to marry Rosemary and to accept a job with an advertising agency that he detests—is more than a literary device. The lack of a political position means that it is unclear whether Comstock is reaching an accommodation or submitting in resignation to a system that is too powerful for the resistance of any one individual.

THE CATALYST OF SPAIN: The Spanish Civil War, which is an unknown conflict for many people today, was both a catalyst for and a powerful symbol of the European tensions that led to World War II. Its complexity took in the major issues of class, religion, and political movements—from fascism to communism, nationalism, and regionalism—not only for Spaniards but also for activists throughout Europe. On one level, the increasing support of Germany and Italy for the Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco convinced many people that the defense of the Spanish Republican Government had become a defense of European stability and democracy. On another, the refusal of the British and French governments to support the Republic, in contrast to the involvement of the Soviet Union, meant that there was never a concerted international intervention against the Nationalists.

The major contribution of the Spanish Civil War to Orwell was to his political development. The outcome, however, was not a sustained commitment to a clear political philosophy. It is notable that Orwell had only joined the militia of POUM, an “independent” Marxist party, after he was unable to serve in the Communist-supported International Brigade and that only weeks before his return to England he was still advocating the strategy pursued by the Spanish government, backed by the Communists. The war brought out Orwell's unrelenting hostility to other intellectuals and activists on the Left. He complained, “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.”¹¹

In Homage to Catalonia Orwell depicts clearly the divisions that turned the Spanish Republican government against nominal allies, such as “independent” socialists and anarchists. He established a foundation for his later work on politics and literature with his denunciation of the propaganda of the Spanish government and its British supporters, such as The New Statesman and Nation. This propaganda consisted both of biased news and commentary and of suppression of reports and opinions that challenged the Spanish government.

Because of the significance of Homage to Catalonia, it is essential to recognize the limited political vision of the book. Orwell's concentration on the dispute within the Left means other dimensions of the Spanish Civil War of equal or even greater importance are given little or no attention. Readers will not find any explanation for the outbreak of the war because of Orwell's lack of understanding of, or even concern with, Spanish politics and history. The war was not only about class and power for the workers but also about the place of religion in Spanish life, the optimal type of government, the role of the military, and various divisions—urban versus rural, north versus south, national versus regional—in Spain. Orwell obscures these issues by referring to the enemy, incorrectly, as “fascists”; many of those fighting for the Nationalists had little sympathy for or even knowledge of fascism. Even the title of the book is misleading, for Orwell offers little information about Catalonia, the region centering on Barcelona that had long sought independence or autonomy within Spain.

Even more significant, given the supposed evolution of Orwell's political awareness, is the absence of any reference to the international dimension of the war beyond repeated denunciations of Soviet influence on the Republic. From its inception, the Spanish conflict was an important test case of European power politics, with Germany and Italy supporting the rebel forces with equipment, advisors, and bombs. Some historians have argued that a decisive intervention against the insurrection could have prevented World War II, but England and France refused to support the Republican government. All of this is beyond Orwell's narrative.

It is ironic, given Orwell's denunciation of propaganda, that the argument of Homage to Catalonia is given strength by its own distortions. Orwell depicts a misguided Spanish government, in league with or manipulated by the Communists, betraying the people by persecuting other movements on the Left. The government's case—that it was those movements, through their emphasis on a workers' revolution rather than on the priority of defeating the insurrection, that jeopardized the war effort—is never mentioned.

PACIFISM: In Keep the Aspidistra Flying Orwell used Gordon Comstock to express his own fatalistic expectations of “the reverberations of future wars. Enemy aeroplanes flying over London, the deep threatening hum of the propellers, the shattering thunder of the bombs.” But it is George Bowling in Coming Up for Air who embodies the author's pacifism. Whereas Gordon's opinions are somewhat devalued by his constant cynicism, George is a thoroughly decent man beset by worries: “In the whole of England at this moment there probably isn't a single bedroom window from which anyone's firing a machine-gun. But how about five years from now? Or two years? Or one year?”¹² Even during his “escape” to Lower Binfield to recapture a quieter past, Bowling cannot evade such fears, especially when a bomb falls on the village. He thinks, “It's started. I knew it! Old Hitler didn't wait. Just sent his bombers across without warning.” In fact, the bomb has accidentally fallen from a British plane on a training flight, but the damage is done to Bowling's illusions: “I'd chucked a pineapple into my dreams, and lest there should be any mistake the Royal Air Force had followed up with five hundred pounds of T.N.T.”¹³

In his essays dating from before World War II, Orwell argued vehemently that preparations for a war against Germany should not be supported because British leaders would institute their own “fascist” political and economic controls. In the July 1939 essay “Not Counting Niggers” he put the case that “the political obscenities of the past two years, the sort of monstrous harlequinade in which everyone is constantly bounding across the stage in a false nose—Quakers shouting for a bigger army, Communists waving Union Jacks, Winston Churchill posing as a democrat—would not have been possible without this guilty consciousness that we are all in the same boat [against fascism].”¹⁴

PATRIOTISM AND WORLD WAR II: On 23 August 1939, just over a week before the German assault on Poland that started World War II, Germany and the Soviet Union surprised the world by announcing a nonaggression pact. Orwell later claimed that, on the eve of the pact, he had “dreamed that the war had started.” Apparently the vision absolved him of any previous beliefs regarding aggression, for it showed him “that I was patriotic at heart, would not sabotage or act against my own side, would support the war, would fight in it.”¹⁵ In fact, although Orwell would not say it openly, the major change was that the issue was no longer just opposition to Hitler's National Socialists but also to Joseph Stalin's Communists.

Orwell complained to a friend about his inability to serve in the military because of his weak lungs.¹⁶ He chided the Socialists for failing to grasp that the “patriotism of the middle classes is a thing to be made use of. The people who stand to attention during ‘God Save the King’ would readily transfer their loyalty to a Socialist regime, if they were handled with the minimum of tact.”¹⁷ Meanwhile, Orwell's former colleagues in the International Labour Party and others on the Left now received the fury of his pen, as he sneered, “The quisling intellectual is a phenomenon of the last two years” and claimed that pacifists were “objectively pro-Fascist.”¹⁸

In 1942, in a roundtable discussion in the Partisan Review, Orwell's position was challenged by three pacifists, Alex Comfort, George Woodcock, and D. S. Savage. Comfort noted, “I see Mr. Orwell is intellectual-hunting again.” Woodcock, who later became a friend and admiring critic of Orwell, made the most telling charge:

If we are to expose antecedents, Orwell does not come off very well. Comrade Orwell, the former police officer of British imperialism (from which the Fascists learnt all they know) in those regions of the Far East where the sun at last sets for ever on the bedraggled Union Jack! Comrade Orwell, former fellow-traveller of the pacifists and regular contributor to the pacifist Adelphi—which he now attacks! Comrade Orwell, former extreme left-winger, ILP partisan and defender of Anarchists (see Homage to Catalonia)! And now Comrade Orwell who returns to his old imperialist allegiances and works at the BBC conducting British propaganda to fox [i.e., mislead] the Indian masses!¹⁹

Orwell, however, was no unqualified defender of the status quo, even if his attitude toward the Indian masses was a shade more than patronizing. Rather, he had taken to the fanciful notion that the war could spark a revolution of the “common people.” This revolution would not be a bloody one—that was the European way—but, amidst the turmoil caused by the war and economic sacrifice at home, the common people would assert their values and policies so forcefully that they would emerge as the new British regime. If all this seemed a bit vague, Orwell assured his readers, “Like all else in England, [the revolution] happens in a sleepy, unwilling way, but it is happening. … The right men will be there when the people really want them, for it is movements that make leaders and not leaders movements.”²⁰

Orwell even had a mechanism for his “revolution”: the Home Guard, in which the esteemed common people were organized into quasi-military units to resist any German invasion. As early as June 1940, he was writing to journals, “Arm The People,” advocating the issuance of hand grenades and shotguns to Guard units. These would become “a democratic guerrilla force.”²¹

Orwell could not sustain this vision of English qualities leading to meaningful political and social change. The rigors of World War II might have initially offered the prospect that Englishmen might demand that the war be fought for a new country, but Orwell eventually sank into a cynical depression about the future. His own role at the BBC directing programs for the Indian subcontinent had not put him in a prime position to influence domestic opinion, and his grand idea of arming the Home Guard had come to nothing. (Unsurprisingly, the government was unwilling to distribute hand grenades and shotguns to potential revolutionaries.) At the end of 1944 Orwell wrote, “There has been no real shift of power and no increase in genuine democracy. The same people still own the property and usurp all the best jobs.”²² Orwell was discovering that he had nothing with which to fulfill the aspiration of “Englishness.”

THE COLD WARRIOR

By the time Animal Farm appeared in August 1945, the war in Europe had ended. Eleven days before its publication, the first atomic bomb had been dropped on Japan. There was also a new government in England, as the Labour Party had defeated Churchill's Conservatives in a general election in June. It was the first time Labour had led the country since 1931, and it heralded the introduction of the social and economic program known as the welfare state.

On the surface, Orwell should have welcomed this victory for socialism. He had not foreseen the election of Labour, predicting that the Conservatives would win by a small majority. After the electoral surprise, he was surprisingly grudging in his embrace of Labour's cause: “One cannot take this slide to the Left as meaning that Britain is on the verge of revolution. … The mood of the country seems to me less revolutionary, less Utopian, even less hopeful, than it was in 1940 or 1942.”²³ True, Orwell did write for The Tribune, the newspaper led by Labour Minister Aneurin Bevan, but it was more as an independent columnist rather than as a voice of the party.

More importantly, the world soon moved from World War II into the Cold War, with the grand alliance of the United States, England, and the Soviet Union dissolving over economic and territorial disputes. By 1947 America had launched a global crusade against Soviet Communism, with positive measures such as the Marshall Plan and covert campaigns to overthrow Soviet-backed governments in Eastern Europe. The government of Clement Attlee in England, which had sought a “third force” between capitalism and communism, was increasingly pressed to follow the American line; if it did not, it would suffer the loss of economic support from the United States.

In this atmosphere Orwell's own socialism soon faded. Unable to find a positive vision to meet his concerns, he was more and more strident in his campaigns against “enemies.” His position was reinforced by close and influential relationships with intellectuals who were leading anti-Communist campaigns. He was part of an informal luncheon club with writers such as Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge; the latter went on to work with British intelligence to check the Soviet menace. Even more important was Orwell's developing friendship with Arthur Koestler, the émigré from Hungary who had left the Communist Party and written the novel Darkness at Noon (1940). The two increasingly directed their attention toward the crusade against intellectuals allegedly directed by Moscow. Celia Kirwan, the sister of Koestler's wife, also played a large role in Orwell's personal and political life, especially after his marriage proposal to her in 1946, which she declined.

From 1943, when Orwell first had the idea that developed into Nineteen Eighty-four, his political and personal development was pointing toward a dystopian view of the near future. Despite his denials, the novel offered little beyond a negative conception of humanity and was directed at the Soviet Union and those on the Left who did not share his vague approach to socialism: “I believe … that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences.”²⁴ Still, Orwell's personal campaign was not solely against these Leftist demons. Nineteen Eighty-four is also a warning against an ill-considered acceleration in technology and the machine society, particularly in its shaping of mass activity through communications. These fears or, in some cases, hopes, underlay the novels of writers such as H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and, most influential in the case of Nineteen Eighty-four, the Soviet writer Evgeny Zamyatin. (Zamyatin's 1924 novel We was little known in Western Europe, but Orwell had obtained a translated copy and greatly admired Zamyatin's futurist and dystopian vision.)

Against these fears and angers Orwell did try to reestablish the bulwark of Englishness with his short essays and his column in The Tribune. Like George Bowling in Coming Up for Air, however, Orwell was coming to recognize that this idyll could not be recovered. A little more than a month after the surrender of Japan, he wrote in a piece titled “You and the Atom Bomb” that the bomb was likely “to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging indefinitely a ‘peace that is no peace.’”²⁵

Nineteen Eighty-four was the fulfillment of this prophecy. Orwell was influenced by the American political theorist James Burnham's conception of three power blocs led by the United States, the Soviet Union, and China (respectively, Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia in Nineteen Eighty-four). In this world England was reduced to the status of an unquestioning ally of America. The vision of the older, gentler, lost England, which Winston Smith finds in an antique glass sphere, is ultimately shattered.

Orwell could have used Nineteen Eighty-four to fashion a far different critique, in which his England rejected the tyrannies of both the Soviet Union and the United States. He was far from a staunch admirer of the American way of life, criticizing the violence of its detective stories and its comic books, “in which sinister professors manufacture atomic bombs in underground labs while Superman whizzes through the clouds, the machine-gun bullets bouncing off his chest like peas, and platinum blondes are raped, or very nearly, by steel robots and 50-foot dinosaurs.”²⁶ Orwell's naming of England as “Airstrip One” was later adopted later by those criticizing British subservience to the United States. In 1947 he even broached the idea of a British-led Europe steering a course between capitalist Uncle Sam and Communist Uncle Joe: “Socialism cannot properly be said to be established until it is world-wide, but the process must begin somewhere, and I cannot imagine it beginning except through the federation of the western European states, transformed into Socialist republics without colonial dependencies.”²⁷

Having cut himself off from a positive conception of socialism, Orwell could not reclaim it. He had been reduced to complaining “that political behaviour is largely non-rational, that the world is suffering from some kind of mental disease which must be diagnosed before it can be cured” and hoping that his adopted son would become a farmer so that he could escape the threat of the atomic bomb, which Orwell expected would be dropped on cities.²⁸ Working-class people, far from being empowered or even ennobled in Nineteen Eighty-four, are either good-hearted but passive or threatening, even irrational, such as an old “prole” in a pub who can offer no sense to Winston Smith. In the end, Winston's crusade, like Orwell's, is that of a lone liberal; in the end, it is doomed to failure.

Orwell's crusade was now devoted to anti-Communism. To pursue this aim, the same man who had denounced Big Brother was willing to cooperate with the secret services of the British government. The author who had written in the starkest of terms about the effects of public denunciation was ready to blacklist others. For years Orwell had kept and updated a list of suspect figures in a notebook. Koestler encouraged the project and annotated the list. Lying in a Gloucestershire sanatorium in February 1949, Orwell mentioned it to Celia Kirwan, the target of his affections a few years earlier. Kirwan had a professional as well as a personal interest in this list, for she was working for the top-secret Information Research Department (IRD), created in 1948 to disseminate anti-Communist propaganda throughout England and overseas.

Orwell's original list had 105 names; of these people, 36 were singled out for special attention and passed to the IRD.²⁹ The suspects included not only Labour Party members of Parliament but also the future poet laureate, C. Day-Lewis, poet Stephen Spender, actors Charlie Chaplin and Michael Redgrave, actor and director Orson Welles, writer J. B. Priestley, actor and singer Paul Robeson, scholar Harold Laski, and historians Isaac Deutscher and A. J. P. Taylor.

On behalf of the Information Research Department, Kirwan offered profuse thanks to Orwell for the list, but this was only the beginning of the author's usefulness to British and American intelligence services. Christopher Woodhouse, a British intelligence officer, “reviewed” Animal Farm for The Times Literary Supplement in 1954, and the IRD developed an Animal Farm comic strip that was distributed by British embassies and published in countries such as India, Burma, Eritrea, Thailand, Mexico, Venezuela, and Brazil. The CIA sought the movie rights to Animal Farm, obtaining them from Orwell's widow, Sonia, after they arranged for her introduction to Clark Gable. The American Committee for Cultural Freedom, a private group secretly funded by the CIA, provided advice on the screenplay for a motion-picture adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-four. Animal Farm was produced as an animated feature in 1955; the movie 1984 was released the following year.³⁰

Notes

1. George Orwell, “Why I Write,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968), volume 1, p. 6.

2. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (New York: Penguin, 1982), p. 37.

3. Ibid., p. 123.

4. Orwell, Coming Up for Air, in The Complete Novels (London: Penguin, 2001), p. 520.

5. Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Orwell: The Transformation (London: Constable, 1979), p. 153.

6. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1962), p. 130.

7. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier diary, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 181.

8. Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier, pp. 139, 152, 159.

9. Ibid., p. 199.

10. Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, in The Complete Novels, pp. 578, 586.

11. Orwell to Jack Common, 12 October 1938, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 357.

12. Orwell, Coming Up for Air, p. 442.

13. Ibid., pp. 562, 565.

14. Orwell, “Not Counting Niggers,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 395.

15. Orwell, “My Country Right or Left,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 1, p. 539.

16. Orwell to John Lehmann, 6 July 1940, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 2, p. 29.

17. Orwell, “London Letter,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 2, p. 50.

18. Orwell, “London Letter,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 2, p. 182; “A Controversy,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 2, p. 226.

19. D. S. Savage, George Woodcock, Alex Comfort, and Orwell, “A Controversy,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 2, pp. 224.

20. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 93.

21. Orwell to the editor of Time and Tide, 22 June 1940, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 2, p. 278.

22. Orwell, “London Letter,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 3, p. 294.

23. Orwell, “London Letter,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 3, p. 395.

24. Orwell to Francis Henson, 16 June 1949, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 4, p. 502.

25. Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb,” The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 4, p. 10.

26. Orwell, “Riding Down from Bangor,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 4, p. 242.

27. Orwell, “Toward European Unity,” in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 4, p. 370.

28. Orwell to Julian Symons, 29 October 1948, in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters, volume 4, p. 449-451.

29. The British Government still refuses to release the names of the thirty-six, and Orwell's list is still withheld from public view. Peter Davison, the editor of twenty volumes of Orwell's correspondence and writings, has published an abridged version of the list with twenty-eight names deleted. See The Complete Works of George Orwell, edited by Davison, volume 20: Our Job Is to Make Life Worth Living (London: Secker & Warburg, 1998), pp. 242-258.

30. C. M. Woodhouse, “Animal Farm,” Times Literary Supplement, 6 August 1945, pp. xxx-xxxi; Richard Norton-Taylor and Seamus Milne, Guardian (London), 11 July 1996, p. 1; Scott Lucas, Freedom's War: The U.S. Crusade against the Soviet Union, 1945-1956 (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 64-65; Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999), pp. 293-301.