.JPG)
George Orwell. Illustration by Ralph Steadman
“Corrupt face” of censorship
By D J Taylor
“The best place in which to study the English left-wing mind is the weekly paper the New Statesman,” George Orwell instructed a Fabian Society audience in November 1941. If this sounds vaguely complimentary, what followed – part of a ten-page excursus, filed under the general heading of “Culture and Democracy” – was anything but. As a magazine, Orwell declared, the NS seemed to have only a “symptomatic” value. He had, he continued, been a regular reader of it for many years, and yet: “Never once have I found in it any coherent policy or any constructive suggestion – anything, in fact, except a general gloom and an automatic discontent with whatever happens to be in progress at the moment.”
Between October 1931 and August 1943, Orwell contributed 23 essays and reviews to a publication that, according to the Fabian lecture, expressed “nothing except the fact that English left-wing intellectuals of all shades do not like the society they are living in but at the same time do not care to face the effort or the responsibility of changing it”. They range from early pieces of reportage such as “Hop-picking” and “Common lodging houses” (both signed with his baptismal name, Eric Blair) to melancholic round-ups of popular fiction and rather more considered reflections on Charles Reade and John Galsworthy. Altogether overshadowing them, on the other hand, is the titanic feud with the magazine’s then editor, Kingsley Martin, that Orwell embarked upon in 1937, and which he regarded as conclusive evidence of the English left’s habit of burying disagreeable facts beneath a topsoil of ideological solidarity.
The issue at stake was the Spanish civil war and in particular the suppression of the Marxist Poum militia. Orwell had fought for the Poum and had taken a bullet through the throat from the communist and republican civil guard. Having escaped across the French border from a Barcelona seething with Stalinist hit squads in the summer of 1937, he stopped at the first post office available to fire off a telegram to the NS, asking if it would like a first-hand account. He chose Martin as the repository of these confidences because he believed that, in its reporting of the first year of the conflict, the NS had offered the only reliable account of conditions on the ground.
A letter to his friend Cyril Connolly, an NS regular, sent from Barcelona in early June, notes: “It is a credit to the New Statesman that it is the only paper, apart from a few obscure ones such as the New Leader, where any but the communist viewpoint has ever got through.”
Martin accepted the offer but took great exception to the article (“Eyewitness in Barcelona”) that followed a few days later, on the grounds that it would “cause trouble”. The precise wording of the rejection, probably made over the telephone, is unknown but the underlying principle was confirmed by letter. Whether as a way of appeasing a disgruntled contributor or acknowledging his new-found status as an expert on Spain, the NS then offered Orwell the chance to review Franz Borkenau’s book The Spanish Cockpit. This, too, was turned down – again by Martin, rather than the magazine’s uncomprehending literary editor, Raymond Mortimer – with the explanation that it controverted editorial policy. Or, as Martin put it: “It is very uncompromisingly said and implies that our Spanish correspondents are all wrong.”
Both articles eventually appeared elsewhere but the damage was done and neither party forgave the other or forgot the principle that had driven them apart. To the end of his life, Orwell regarded Martin as a communist stooge and once asked a lunch guest in a crowded restaurant into which his bête noire had strayed to change places with him so that he could be spared the sight of that “corrupt face”.
Martin’s starring role in Orwell’s demonology is confirmed by the entry next to his name in the celebrated list of “crypto-communists and fellow-travellers” sent to the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office in May 1949: “too dishonest to be outright ‘crypto’ or fellow-traveller but reliably pro-Russian on all major issues”.
Hindsight, inevitably, sides with Orwell, as Adrian Smith does here. Yet even the most rabid Orwell-fancier would probably concede that what, on the surface, looks like a classic case of the trampling of free speech by ideological necessity is considerably less clear-cut once you dig a little further down into the ooze of pre-war, left-wing politics.
Martin, a luminous and practically sacerdotal figure, did not take his orders from Moscow. His defence was that the press was dominated by anti-republican propaganda and that each side had behaved with appalling cruelty, “But I had to make my decision on general public grounds, to the end that one side might win rather than the other side.” Additionally, the Borkenau review, according to Martin’s reading of it, was merely a restatement of Orwell’s political opinions. Martin agonised about this stand-off for the remaining 30 years of his life. Not one to forget a grudge, Orwell spent the next five years inserting pointed little references to the NS into his journalism. Most of these had to do with what he supposed to be the paper’s equivocal attitude to the Second World War. Shortly after the outbreak of war, he could be heard complaining about the “conditions” that would have to be fulfilled to persuade the NS to support the conflict – “as if war were a bloody cricket match”. In September 1940, he criticised the defeatist leader writers of the News Chronicle for being “noisemakers like the New Statesman . . . All those people can be counted on to collapse when the conditions of war become intolerable.”
There were other wounding remarks about the NS being “under direct communist influence” and the readership being “worshippers of Stalin”, not to mention a Tribune assault on fellow-travellers so uncompromising (“Once a whore, always a whore”) that it brought Martin – though unmentioned in the piece – to the telephone threatening a libel writ. It is worth asking why Orwell, despite this decade-long odyssey of bad faith and mutual suspicion, kept on writing for a publication whose editorial titan he so much despised and why it occupied such a substantial compartment in his intellectual life. His letters are full of references to its literary pages; he had copies of the NS sent out to him in Morocco, where he spent the winter of 1938-39; and a gift of book tokens had him combing through the reviews in search of suitable Christmas presents.
One of the answers, as Orwell’s first biographer, Bernard Crick, once pointed out, is the NS’s sempiternal division into a front half unashamedly devoted to leftist politics and a back half that assumed that a book could have a life of its own, irrespective of the ideological anvil on which it had been forged. Orwell bore no ill-will to Mortimer, who wrote to apologise once the facts of the case had come his way and reassured him, “There is no premium here on Stalinist orthodoxy.”
Another lies in the much more prosaic need to earn a living. It is difficult to think of any other explanation for the round-up of novels by John Llewellyn Rhys, Nina Fedorova, Dan Wickenden and Bruce Marshall that Orwell contributed to the issue dated 22 February 1941, which ends with this sobering judgement: “I must record my opinion that the novels coming out at present are at a terribly low level, the lowest, probably, within living memory.” It was poor consolation, Orwell concluded, to reflect: “The ones coming out in Germany are probably worse.”
D J Taylor is the author of the biography “Orwell: the Life” (Vintage, £10.99)
Unwelcome guerrilla
By Adrian Smith
To be frank, the New Statesman and George Orwell were never a natural fit. Orwell’s first loyalties as a journalist were to the periodical Partisan Review and the Tribune newspaper: throughout the Second World War, the voice of east coast revolutionary socialism published his London Letter and in 1943 Nye Bevan’s mouthpiece for the Labour left appointed him literary editor.
When, in 1984 (note the year), the NS published a slim volume of articles by and about Orwell, the then editor, Hugh Stephenson, to his credit, offered an honest assessment of what was always a prickly relationship. The anthology was entitled Unwelcome Guerrilla – Orwell’s view of himself and an apt description of his uncomfortable presence in the columns of Kingsley Martin’s NS.
The magazine’s generous obituary memorably labelled him “the wintry conscience of a generation”, a generation that looked to the NS for uninhibited comment and honest reporting and that, to Orwell’s mind, had too often been disappointed.
The launch of the newly merged New Statesman and Nation in April 1931 proved timely. A dual crisis of capitalism and liberal democracy demanded a fresh, authentically progressive perspective on the continuing failure of fiscal and monetary orthodoxy to combat acute poverty and social deprivation. Readership rose quickly and the then Eric Blair saw Martin’s re-energised weekly as an obvious outlet for material later incorporated into Down and Out in Paris and London. However, only two articles ever appeared and, by the mid-1930s, “George Orwell” was unknown to Martin and his literary editor, Raymond Mortimer, other than as a minor writer whose four books had been briefly but favourably reviewed. On May Day 1937, all that changed.
In London that Saturday, the NS carried a generally sympathetic review of The Road to Wigan Pier, the writer deducing from the second, more polemical half of the book that Orwell regarded the weekly “as a pink rag to his bull-wrath” – and he was right. Any claims that Martin may have made that his paper constituted Labour’s socialist conscience struck Orwell as sanctimonious and self-centred, signalling the remoteness of a radical English intelligentsia from the harsh realities and the material priorities of working-class life.
Ernest Bevin, the trade union power broker and a towering figure in the Churchill and Attlee administrations, had similar views, speculating in July 1945 on how long it would be before Martin would “stab the Labour government in the back”. Bevin, of course, presumed blind loyalty, unlike Orwell, who was always a proud member of the awkward squad. Natural dissenters have to take criticism as well as give it out, yet Orwell was sensitive to the left’s unease over The Road to Wigan Pier, a hostile review in the Daily Worker fuelling an antipathy to the Communist Party forged by his six months fighting to defend the Spanish republic.
On 1 May 1937, Orwell was in no position to read book reviews, favourable or otherwise. On returning from the Aragon front to Barcelona, he found himself vulnerable to the Soviet-backed government assault on the non-Stalinist Marxists of the Poum (the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista). The Catalan militias had thwarted the military coup of July 1936, helped defend Madrid the following autumn and aggressively promoted the collectivisation of farming and industry across the north-east of republican Spain.
For the Poum as much as for its anarchist allies, the defeat of fascism was synonymous with social revolution and the smashing of the bourgeois state – promise of the latter would mobilise the masses to facilitate the former. For the government in Madrid, determined to merge the militias within a conventional popular army, all means were justified to reassure the republic’s middle classes that its sole priority was winning the war. Ministers shared their Russian ally’s strategy of cultivating the western liberal democracies and promoting the Popular Front as a broad, progressive alliance.
Soviet advisers and munitions were so vital to the republic’s survival that the Spanish Communists’ influence was wholly disproportionate to the size of their party. Between May and August 1937, the debate over war or revolution, so cleverly illuminated by Ken Loach in the central scene of Land and Freedom, ended abruptly with the ruthless suppression of the Poum.
Orwell, having experienced the militia’s military indiscipline, was sympathetic to those republicans, not least members of the International Brigade, who argued that inertia on the Aragon front was allowing the Nationalists to intensify their offensive further south. This criticism of the Poum only emerged in 1942, but five years earlier he had been appalled by the violence inflicted on party activists. Militia members, even overseas volunteers, were guilty by association – hence, Orwell and his wife found themselves forced to flee Barcelona.
By early July they were back in Britain, enraged at the extent to which almost everyone on the left accepted without question a distorted and wholly inaccurate version of events; the notion that a revolutionary party such as the Poum had been manipulated by both fascists and Trotskyists to destroy the republic from within was patently absurd and yet it was commonly believed. Orwell blamed communists and fellow-travellers for fostering the myth, refusing to exempt Martin from a too-easy tolerance of “totalitarian” methods – in other words, peddling “the big lie”. In later years, though Orwell might acknowledge the Poum’s failings as a fighting force, he never forgave those who denied him a platform on which to set the story straight about his adopted party’s brutal destruction; not least the editor of the NS.
By 1937, the magazine’s readership had more than doubled in six years and it was well on the way to becoming required reading for Britain’s educated, left-leaning middle classes. No wonder Orwell looked first to the NS when seeking to publish “Spilling the Spanish Beans”, his prelude to Homage to Catalonia. He assumed that Martin would welcome a counterblast to the propagandist line emanating from Madrid, the Comintern headquarters in Paris and the CPGB offices in King Street. The harsh reality was that he received a polite refusal and, eventually, the piece appeared in the little-read New English Weekly. Here was a signal of what Orwell could expect upon completion of his book and indeed the Left Book Club’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, rejected his manuscript unseen. Eventually, Fredric Warburg published Homage to Catalonia, securing initial sales of fewer than 1,000 copies; what today is the best-known book about the Spanish civil war was all but forgotten when Orwell died in January 1950.
The rejection of “Spilling the Spanish Beans” was met with surprisingly little fuss, perhaps because the piece had not been commissioned. In any case, as D J Taylor notes, to soften the blow, the NS asked Orwell to review The Spanish Cockpit by Franz Borkenau. Here was a veteran ex-Communist whose personal impressions of the war’s early stages confirmed Orwell’s belief that an honourable cause had been betrayed by a power-hungry ideology that mirrored fascism in its methods and apparatus.
In his review, Orwell echoed the charges made in “Spilling the Spanish Beans” and again the NS chose not to publish. Mortimer deemed the review opinionated and uninformative, while Martin insisted: “It too far controverts the political policy of the paper.” According to its editor, the NS had allowed commentators on the war to voice concerns over events in Catalonia but Orwell’s opinions “too directly contradict conclusions that have been very carefully reached in the front half”.
In Editor, his second volume of memoirs, published not long before he died in 1969, Martin defended his decision on the grounds of “realism”, arguing that a brutal seizure of power in Barcelona had been the unfortunate but acceptable price of securing Soviet aid for an otherwise friendless republic. Like Henri Perron, the leftist editor handed evidence of Stalinist abuses in Simone de Beauvoir’s novel Les mandarins, Martin feared that the publication of “communist atrocities” would provide ammunition for conservative critics close to home. Unlike Perron, Martin chose expediency over principle, a decision he defended until the day he died: “To me, this was THE war . . . I was very much alone, fighting the republicans’ battle in a very lonely way; and I didn’t see it as my function to play the other side’s game.” Orwell never forgave him, and henceforth dealt only with Mortimer’s successor in the back half of the paper, V S Pritchett.
As a research student in the late 1970s, I viewed the clash between Martin and Orwell in simple, black-and-white terms. Over tea at Charing Cross, with all the arrogance of youth, I pompously lectured C H Rolph – Martin’s official biographer and in his day an NS assistant editor and an inspector with the Met – on why Martin was so demonstrably in the wrong. Never condescending, Rolph gently pointed out that I was not around in the late 1930s and could scarcely conceive how hard it was to generate interest in Spain: the republic faced criticism from numerous hostile newspapers, not least the Daily Mail, and few questioned the National Government’s claim that non-intervention prevented a wider war in Europe. Rolph’s defence of his old friend was persuasive and I became more muted in my criticism of Martin. Yet, in the final analysis, I still consider his action misguided.
In Editor, Martin confirmed his awareness of communist excesses, excusing his silence on the grounds that he had had no idea how bad the situation was and that to underestimate was understandable, given the unprecedented level of Nationalist violence. Glossing over the abuse of human rights behind republican lines may not, in Orwell’s words, reveal “the mentality of a whore”; but it does suggest a belief that the ends justify the means wholly at odds with the fundamental values of decency, openness and intellectual honesty that the republic was ostensibly seeking to uphold.
The “unwelcome guerrilla” retained a reluctant regard for the NS but that didn’t stop him bearing a grudge. In later years, his mind clouded by illness, Orwell’s judgement regarding the paper and its editorial staff became gravely flawed – witness his ill-founded accusations of cold war subversion in 1945. There is no excuse for bad behaviour but the combination of Gollancz’s rejection of Animal Farm and Martin’s sneering review when the novel finally appeared constituted a sharp reminder of events eight years earlier. Orwell’s anger still burned, and justifiably so.
Adrian Smith is a professor of history at the University of Southampton. He is the author of “The New Statesman: Portrait of a Political Weekly (1913-31)”
Content from our partners
Related
