Re: [Orwell] was seeking to escape the full weight of the Labour government's punishing surtax regime as all his royalties arrived in a short period and he feared leaving his widow and six-year-old son with a gigantic bill for death duties.
Huh?! That's a mean, petty slander against one of the most visionary British authors.... And it's not even the most devastating revelation about Orwell --clue:
In Britain, the latest and perhaps last flickering of that now familiar argument was prompted by this new edition. Shortly before its publication, the right-wing Daily Telegraph ran a front-page story headlined “Socialist icon who became an informer.” The hot news (drawn from an advance copy of this edition, but actually known since 1996) was that Orwell had compiled a list — sorry, a “Big Brother dossier” — of people he considered to be fellow travelers, and in 1949 had passed on thirty-five names to Celia Kirwan, a friend working in the Information Research Department. This was a newly formed, semi-secret department of the Foreign Office charged with countering the communist propaganda offensive.
The Telegraph’s own editorial said Orwell was quite right to do this, but commentators on the left expressed dismay, as they had when the government released some of the relevant documents in 1996. For Andrew Marr, a former editor of the Independent, he instantly became “a damaged hero”. “To think Orwell could label possible communists ‘Jewish’ and ‘English Jew’ as relevant information for British officialdom — just a few years after the concentration camps had been revealed to the world — is just jaw-dropping.”
Davison gives us the true facts, in impeccable detail. In the late 1940s Orwell kept a small, pale blue notebook listing what he called “crypto-communists and fellow-travellers”. Davison prints 135 names; another thirty-six have been withheld for fear of libel actions. The entries, with biographical details, range from one Peter Smollett — “Almost certainly agent of some kind” — through the New Statesman editor Kingsley Martin, who had suppressed Orwell’s dissident account of Spain — “Decayed liberal. Very dishonest” — and the historian E. H. Carr — “Appeaser only” — to the poet Stephen Spender — “Sentimental sympathizer, & very unreliable. Easily influenced. Tendency towards homosexuality.”
As I have mentioned already, Orwell was an inveterate note-taker and list-maker, and this is a very idiosyncratic private list, touched with humor. Nonetheless, there is something disquieting — a touch of the old imperial policeman — about a man who can have lunch with a friend like Stephen Spender, then go home to file him in this way. It is unsettling to see the labeling “Jewish?” (Charlie Chaplin) and “English Jew” (Tom Driberg), even if other names have “Jugo-Slav”, “Polish”, “Anglo-American”, and so on. The fact is that while Orwell wrote perceptively and forcefully against anti-Semitism, he himself never quite lost the traces of a rather Edwardian English anti-Semitism, which had been especially pronounced among the imperial “lower-upper-middle class”. (It’s painfully visible in Down and Out in Paris and London.)
But these are intimate biographical insights, obtained by posthumous peeping. He never intended this list for publication. On the available evidence, Marr is quite wrong to suggest that Orwell saw the label “Jewish” as “relevant information for British officialdom”[1]. All he did was to pass on thirty-five names of people from this notebook. He did this not to get them spied upon by MI5, but so that communists should not inadvertently be used as anticommunist propagandists.
[...]
orwell.ru
Besides, Orwell is no exception as far as the (seedy) private life of most "geniuses"/great men is concerned. Did you read about Charlie Chaplin and his lust for teenage girls? The way he divorced the first one? Or Albert Einstein and his family? Rev Martin Luther King's sexual escapades?
If anything, the fact that Orwell on his deathbed cared about the livelihood of his loved ones doesn't spoil his political sincerity nor his farsighted intuitions about totalitarianism.
Gus |
