Now, how about Mr Orwell's own position, and the position of people like him? I would ask him to consider, first, the company he keeps. Who are his leaders? What is the actual social system which he is fighting to defend? What hopes has he of diverting the stream of history the way he wants it to go? Brave words and muddled thinking cannot disguise the fact that Mr Orwell, like all the other supporters of the war, shipping magnates, coal owners, proletarians, university professors, Sunday journalists, trade-union leaders, Church dignitaries, scoundrels and honest men, is being swept along by history, not directing it. Like them, he will be deposited, along with other detritus, where history decides, not where he thinks. Mr Orwell is, I believe, a man of integrity, an honest man. But that does not make up for his superficiality. And can we afford superficiality, at any time, still less times like these?
11 May 1942
Dry Drayton, England
GEORGE WOODCOCK:8
8. George Woodcock (1912- ), Anarchist, editor of Now 1940-47, author of William Godwin, Anarchism and The Crystal Spirit. At present Professor of English at the University of British Columbia and since 1959, editor of Canadian Literature. After this controversy he and Orwell corresponded and remained friends until Orwell's death.
I hope you will allow me to comment in your columns on certain references in George Orwell's London. Letter to the review Now, of which I am editor.
Orwell suggests that this paper has a Fascist tendency, and names two of its contributors, Hugh Ross Williamson and the Duke of Bedford, to prove his case. In fact, Now was established early in the war as a review for publishing literary matter and also as a forum for controversial writing which could not readily find publication under wartime conditions. Not all the writers were opposed to the war, and of the fifty odd contributors to the seven numbers, only two, those named by Orwell, were even reputed to have Fascist tendencies. Neither of these men contributed more than one article to the review. The remaining writers included Anarchists, Stalinists, Trotskyists, pacifists and New Statesman moderates. Julian Huxley and Herbert Read, two of its best:known contributors, can hardly be accused of Fascism!
The reference to the article by Julian Symons is, in my opinion, unjust. Orwell gives no idea of its subject, and does not quote a single sentence to prove his assertion that it is "vaguely Fascist"! No one in England, except Orwell and possibly the Stalinists, would think of suggesting that Julian Symons has any Fascist tendencies. On the contrary, he has been consistently anti-Fascist, and the article mentioned, which attacks Now's former lack of a definite political line, is Marxist in tendency.
I do not propose to defend Hugh Ross Williamson or the Duke of Bedford -- although I would mention that neither of them belonged to the B.U.F. and that the People's Party, although it may have contained former Fascists, was not a Fascist party and contained many honest pacifists and Socialists, like Ben Greene, whose wrongful imprisonment and maltreatment in gaol caused a major scandal. I would also point out that if we are to expose antecedents, Orwell himself does not come off very well. Comrade Orwell, the former police official 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, I.L.P. partisan and defender of Anarchists (see Homage to Catalonia)! And now Comrade Orwell who returns to his old imperialist allegiances and works at the B.B.C. conducting British propaganda to fox the Indian masses! It would seem that Orwell himself shows to a surprising degree the overlapping of leftwing, pacifist and reactionary tendencies of which he accuses others!
Adverting to Now, I would mention that this review has abandoned its position as an independent forum, and has now become the cultural review of the British Anarchist movement. Perhaps Mr Orwell will regard this as another proof of his mystic and blimpish trinity.
Finally, I would point out two inaccuracies in Orwell's letter. The Anarchist pamphlet to which he refers is entitled The Russian Myth, and the editor of the Adelphi during the earlier part of the war was not John Middleton Murry, but the late Max Plowman.
19 May 1942
Richmond, England
ALEX COMFORT:9
9. Alex Comfort (1920- ), poet, novelist, pamphleteer and medical biologist.
I see that Mr Orwell is intellectual-hunting again, in your pages this time, and that he has made the discovery that almost every writer under thirty in this country has his feet already on the slippery slope to Fascism, or at least to compromise. It seems I am a "pure pacifist of the other-cheek" variety, a piece of horticultural eulogy I'm glad I did not miss, and that I deserve a spanking for associating with such disreputables as the Duke of Bedford and the -- perfectly harmless -- Ross Williamson. The trouble is that some of your American readers may not realize Mr Orwell's status in this country and take his commentary seriously. We all like him here, though the standard of his pamphleteering is going down of late, and we know him as the preacher of a doctrine of Physical Courage as an Asset to the Leftwing Intellectual, and so forth. I think we all agree that he is pretty thoroughly out of touch with any writing under thirty years of age, and his last two public performances -- a reproof in sorrow to my book No Such Liberty, and this "London Letter" of his -- suggest that he still has not grasped why most of the post-thirties poets are pacifists, or what their pacifism would entail if Hitler arrived here.
Mr Orwell calls us "objectively proFascist". I suppose he means that we are letting anti-Fascism go by default. If we suggest to him that we, who have the single intention of salvaging English artistic culture when the crash comes, are the only people likely to continue to hold genuinely anti-Fascist values, he will not be convinced. But perhaps he will grant that Hitler's greatest and irretrievable victory over here was when he persuaded the English people that the only way to lick Fascism was to imitate it. He puts us in a dilemma which cannot be practically rebutted, only broken away from -- "If I win, you have political Fascism victorious: if you want to beat me, you must assimilate as much of its philosophy as you can, so that I am bound to win either way." Accordingly we began feverishly jamming into our national life all the minor pieces of Fascist practice which did not include Socialist methods, sitting on the press "because this is Total War", making our soldiers jab blood bladders while loudspeakers howl propaganda at them, because the German army consisted of efficient yahoos. The only people who said that to defeat Fascism one must (a) try to understand it and (b) refuse to accept its tenets oneself were the pacifists. It looks as if Mr Orwell and his warlike friends were being not objectively but constructively supporters of the entire philosophical apparatus which they quite genuinely detest.
What, again, does Mr Orwell imagine the role of the artist should be in occupied territory? He should protest with all his force, where and when he can, against such evils as he sees -- but can he do this more usefully by temporarily accepting the status quo, or by skirmishing in Epping Forest with a pocket full of hand-grenades? I think that English writers honour, and will follow when the opportunity comes, the example of integrity which Gide has set. We are going to be entrusted with the job of saving what remains of the structure of civilized values from Hitler or alternatively from Churchill and his bladder-prickers. The men who, like Orwell, could have helped, are calling us Fascists and presumably dancing round the ruins of Munster Cathedral. We prefer not to join them, and if, in the pursuit of our task we find ourselves obliged to publish in the same paper as the Devil himself, the others having politely refused us as unorthodox, we shall have very few qualms.
Brentwood, England
18 May 1942
GEORGE ORWELL:
Since I don't suppose you want to fill an entire number of P.R. with squalid controversies imported from across the Atlantic, I will lump together the various letters you have sent on to me (from Messrs Savage, Woodco
ck and Comfort), as the central issue in all of them is the same. But I must afterwards deal separately with some points of fact raised in various of the letters.
Pacifism. Pacifism is objectively proFascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, "he that is not with me is against me". The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle, while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security. Mr Savage remarks that "according to this type of reasoning, a German or Japanese pacifist would be 'objectively pro-British'." But of course he would be! That is why pacifist activities are not permitted in those countries (in both of them the penalty is, or can be, beheading) while both the Germans and the Japanese do all they can to encourage the spread of pacifism in British and American territories. The Germans even run a spurious "freedom" station which serves out pacifist propaganda indistinguishable from that of the P.P.U. They would stimulate pacifism in Russia as well if they could, but in that case they have tougher babies to deal with. In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
I am not interested in pacifism as a "moral phenomenon". If Mr Savage and others imagine that one can somehow "overcome" the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen. As an ex-Indian civil servant, it always makes me shout with laughter to hear, for instance, Gandhi named as an example of the success of non-violence. As long as twenty years ago it was cynically admitted in Anglo-Indian circles that Gandhi was very useful to the British Government. So he will be to the Japanese if they get there. Despotic governments can stand "moral force" till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force. But though not much interested in the "theory" of pacifism, I am interested in the psychological processes by which pacifists who have started out with an alleged horror of violence end up with a marked tendency to be fascinated by the success and power of Nazism. Even pacifists who wouldn't own to any such fascination are beginning to claim that a Nazi victory is desirable in itself. In the letter you sent on to me, Mr Comfort considers that an artist in occupied territory ought to "protest against such evils as he sees", but considers that this is best done by "temporarily accepting the status quo" (like Deat or Bergery, for instance?). A few weeks back he was hoping for a Nazi victory because of the stimulating effect it would have upon the arts:
As far as I can see, no therapy short of complete military defeat has any chance of re-establishing the common stability of literature and of the man in the street. One can imagine the greater the adversity the greater the sudden realization of a stream of imaginative work, and the greater the sudden katharsis of poetry, from the isolated interpretation of war as calamity to the realization of the imaginative and actual tragedy of Man. When we have access again to the literature of the war years in France, Poland and Czechoslovakia, I am confident that that is what we shall find. (From a letter to Horizon.)
I pass over the money-sheltered ignorance capable of believing that literary life is still going on in, for instance, Poland, and remark merely that statements like this justify me in saying that our English pacifists are tending towards active proFascism. But I don't particularly object to that. What I object to is the intellectual cowardice of people who are objectively and to some extent emotionally proFascist, but who don't care to say so and take refuge behind the formula "I am just as anti-Fascist as anyone, but --". The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a "case", obscuring the opponent's point of view and avoiding awkward questions. The line normally followed is "Those who fight against Fascism go Fascist themselves." In order to evade the quite obvious objections that can be raised to this, the following propaganda-tricks are used:
1. The Fascizing processes occurring in Britain as a result of war are systematically exaggerated.
2. The actual record of Fascism, especially its pre-war history, is ignored or pooh-poohed as "propaganda". Discussion of what the world would actually be like if the Axis dominated it is evaded.
3. Those who want to struggle against Fascism are accused of being wholehearted defenders of capitalist "democracy". The fact that the rich everywhere tend to be proFascist and the working class are nearly always anti-Fascist is hushed up.
4. It is tacitly pretended that the war is only between Britain and Germany. Mention of Russia and China, and their fate if Fascism is permitted to win, is avoided. (You won't find one word about Russia or China in the three letters you sent to me.)
Now as to one or two points of fact which I must deal with if your correspondents' letters are to be printed in full.
My past and present. Mr Woodcock tries to discredit me by saying that (a) I once served in the Indian Imperial Police, (b) I have written articles for the Adelphi and was mixed up with the Trotskyists in Spain, and (c) that I am at the B.B.C. "conducting British propaganda to fox the Indian masses". With regard to (a), it is quite true that I served five years in the Indian Police. It is also true that I gave up that job, partly because it didn't suit me but mainly because I would not any longer be a servant of imperialism. I am against imperialism because I know something about it from the inside. The whole history of this is to be found in my writings, including a novel10 which I think I can claim was a kind of prophecy of what happened this year in Burma, (b) Of course I have written for the Adelphi. Why not? I once wrote an article for a vegetarian paper. Does that make me a vegetarian? I was associated with the Trotskyists in Spain. It was chance that I was serving in the P.O.U.M. militia and not another, and I largely disagreed with the P.O.U.M. "line" and told its leaders so freely, but when they were afterwards accused of proFascist activities I defended them as best I could. How does this contradict my present anti-Hitler attitude? It is news to me that Trotskyists are either pacifists or proFascists, (c) Does Mr Woodcock really know what kind of stuff I put out in the Indian broadcasts? He does not -- though I would be quite glad to tell him about it. He is careful not to mention what other people are associated with these Indian broadcasts. One for instance is Herbert Read, whom he mentions with approval. Others are T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Reginald Reynolds, Stephen Spender, J. B. S. Haldane, Tom Wintringham. Most of our broadcasters are Indian leftwing intellectuals, from Liberals to Trotskyists, some of them bitterly anti-British. They don't do it to "fox the Indian masses" but because they know what a Fascist victory would mean to the chances of India's independence. Why not try to find out what I am doing before accusing my good faith?
10. Burmese Days.
"Mr Orwell is intellectual-hunting again" (Mr Comfort). I have never attacked "the intellectuals" or "the intelligentsia" en bloc. I have used a lot of ink and done myself a lot of harm by attacking the successive literary cliques which have infested this country, not because they were intellectuals but precisely because they were not what I mean by true intellectuals. The life of a clique is about five years and I have been writing long enough to see three of them come and two go -- the Catholic gang, the Stalinist gang, and the present pacifist or, as they are sometimes nicknamed, Fascifist gang. My case against all of them is that they write mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual arse-licking. But even with these various schools I would differentiate between individuals. I would never think of coupling Christopher Dawson with Arnold Lunn, or Malraux with Palme Dutt, or Max Plowman with the Duke of Bedford. And even the work of one individual can exist at very different levels. For instance Mr Comfort him
self wrote one poem I value greatly ('The Atoll in the Mind'), and I wish he would write more of them instead of lifeless propaganda tracts dressed up as novels. But this letter he has chosen to send you is a different matter. Instead of answering what I have said he tries to prejudice an audience to whom I am little known by a misrepresentation of my general line and sneers about my "status" in England. (A writer isn't judged by his "status", he is judged by his work.) That is on a par with "peace" propaganda which has to avoid mention of Hitler's invasion of Russia, and it is not what I mean by intellectual honesty. It is just because I do take the function of the intelligentsia seriously that I don't like the sneers, libels, parrot phrases and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our English literary world, and perhaps in yours also.
12 July 1942
London, England
Partisan Review, September-October 1942
35. London Letter to Partisan Review
London, England
29 August 1942
Dear Editors,
I write this letter at a moment when it is almost certain to be overtaken and swamped by events. We are still in the same state of frozen crisis as we were three months ago. Cripps is still enigmatically in office, gradually losing credit with the Left but believed by many to be waiting his moment to leave the Government and proclaim a revolutionary policy. Such a development as there has been is definitely in a reactionary direction. Many people besides myself have noticed an all-round increase in blimpishness, a drive against giving the war an anti-Fascist colour, a general shedding of the phony radicalism of the past two years. The India business twitched the masks off many faces, including Lord Rothermere's. This seems to violate the principle that every regime moves to the Left in moments of disaster, and vice versa, for one could hardly describe the last six months as triumphant. But something or other appears to have made the Blimps feel much more sure of themselves.