Orwell’s calling names

Orwell’s minor role as a government informer was revealed two years ago when documents from Britain’s PublicRecord Office were declassified. But the names of people that he is said to have informed on remained secret. Even now, Peter Davison, the editor of the new collection, has withheld 30 names because the people are still alive. His list, written up in a small blue notebook, was intended for a shadowy branch of the British Foreign Office the Information Research Departmen (IRD), which appears to have had an anti-communist function. Celia Kirwan a friend of Orwell’s was employed by the IRD. Kirwan was a woman Orwell had once proposed marriage to and been refused, but whose friendship he valued.

Orwell died of tuberculosis in 1950. A short time before his death, he offered to draw up a list of fellow journalists and writers who, he said, “are crypto-Communists, fellow travellers, or inclined that way, and should not be trusted as propagandists”. In his list, which according to the editor, is hand written with additions and remarks crossed through, Orwell attempts to place the people politically asparty members, sympathisers, appeasers or even careerists. The most damning remarks in the list are “insincere, dishonest” and “unreliable”. The list reveals a great deal about Orwell, his prejudices and his passions. Some of his least charitable remarks are reserved for other writers. George Bernard Shaw although with “no sort of tie-up” is “reliably pro-Russian on all major issues”.

Priestly is a “strong sympathiser, possibly has some kind of organisational tie-up” and is “very anti-USA, makes huge sums of money in USSR???”. Spender is a “sentimental sympathiser…very unreliable” with a “tendency towards homosexuality”. John Steinbeck is a “spurious writer” and a “pseudo-naff”. The poet Louis Untermeyer is “very silly”.

Orwell’s motivation in compiling the list, it would appear, was an intense anger against people he saw as appeasers of Stalin’s totalitarian regime. In a letter to Kirwan, written from the Cotswold Sanatorium, Orwell wrote, referring to his list: “It isn’tvery sensational and I don’t suppose it will tell your friends anything they don’t know. At the same time it isn’t a bad thing to have the people who are probably unreliable listed.”

Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War and the sense that his left wing colleagues conspired to discredit this assessment of the Stalinists’ role in the war marked a change in his attitude but not in his adherence to socialism. Publishers including Victor Gollancz and Jonathan Cape turned down Orwell’s Animal Farm, because it was felt that its publication would hurt the Soviet Union. Jonathan Cape’s decision was said to have been influenced by an official in the wartime Ministry of Information. Peter Davison is fairly certain that the official was Peter Smollett, a correspondent of The Times, who was employed in the Russian section of the MOI. Smollett is one of the names that figures on Orwell’s list with the remarks: “Almost certainly agent of some kind. Said to be careerist. Very dishonest.”Smollet, it is now known was an associate of the double agent Kim Philby. Smollett worked and died with his cover intact. Clearly, Orwell’s account of him made little impact.