Lear, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Orwell

The Play’s the Thing: Orwell and Drama (Last of Three)

by Richard Lance Keeble of the ORWELL SOCIETY

19th September 2020

Drama at the BBC: The next act

Orwell’s work for the BBC is not to end in November 1943. For through his friendship with Rayner Heppenstall, a producer at the corporation, he goes on to write two fine dramatic adaptations – of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, for the Home Service on 29 March 1946 (CWGO XIII: 179-201). The second, too often neglected, is of Little Red Riding Hood (ibid: 345-354). Just like the earlier adaptation of Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ for the BBC’s Eastern Service, this reflects Orwell’s deep interest in the fairy story genre – which finds its most famous flowering in Animal Farm – A Fairy Story, in 1945. And Orwell is to adapt his famous satire on the Russian revolution for the BBC in 1947. Crick describes it as ‘very stilted’ (1980: 493) while Orwell told his friend, Mamaine Paget: ‘I had the feeling that they had spoilt it but one nearly always does with anything one writes for the air’ (Lynskey 2019: 157).

ORWELL’s fascination with the theatre and Shakespeare in particular culminates in two remarkable ways. This first is his essay, ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, published in Polemic, in March 1947. It has been strangely missed, or its significance downplayed, by the biographers.

There is no mention of the essay at all in either Shelden (1991) or Meyers (2000) while D. J. Taylor (2003) and Bowker (2003) only comment on it en passant. Crick (op cit: 438, 520, 522) first focuses on Orwell’s critique of anarchism and pacifism; in the third reference he points out Orwell’s ‘tempered pessimism’; only in the second reference is there any mention of Shakespeare as he describes it as ‘a profound comparison of the didacticism of Tolstoy with the tolerant humanism of Shakespeare’.

From British Library’s blog on Tolstoy and Orwell

Orwell bases his critique of Tolstoy on an obscure pamphlet in which he has damned King Lear as ‘stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious’ etc. (1980 [1947]: 793). Tolstoy fails to consider Shakespeare as a poet. ‘Those who care most for Shakespeare value him in the first place for his use of language, the “verbal music” which even Bernard Shaw, another hostile critic, admits to be “irresistible”’ (ibid: 796). Tolstoy sees no justification for the presence of the Fool. But for Orwell it’s crucial. ‘He acts not only as a sort of chorus, making the central situation clearer by commenting on it more intelligently than the other characters, but as a foil to Lear’s frenzies. His jokes, riddles and scraps of rhyme, and his endless digs at Lear’s high-minded folly … are like a trickle of sanity running through the play….'

But Tolstoy’s essential ‘anti-human’ stance draws Orwell’s special venom. Indeed, what Tolstoy probably most dislikes about Shakespeare ‘is a sort of exuberance, a tendency to take – not so much a pleasure as simply an interest in the actual process of life’ (ibid). In other words, it’s a ‘quarrel between the religious and humanist attitudes towards life’.

An early English language edition of Tolstoy’s essay.

The plot of King Lear, Orwell argues, is essentially about renunciation. And this clearly resonates with Tolstoy’s own history. ‘In his old age he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights and made an attempt – a sincere attempt though it was not successful – to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant. … Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him happier. But there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was not happy’ (ibid: 799, italics in the original). Indeed, one of the morals of the play is that ‘to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack’. Moreover, all of Shakespeare’s later tragedies ‘start out with the humanist assumption that life, although full of sorrow, is worth living and that Man is a noble animal – a belief which Tolstoy in his old age did not share’. Against Tolstoy’s ‘other-worldliness’, Orwell celebrates Shakespeare’s worldly vitality, his love of life which he conveys, above all, in the ‘music of language’.

Orwell next moves on to Tolstoy’s pacifism – criticising it, along with anarchism, for being intolerant. ‘For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone should be bullied into thinking likewise’ (ibid: 802).

In many respects, Orwell is presenting a very slanted view of Tolstoy. For instance, Peter Marshall offers a totally different picture of him in his monumental history of anarchism: ‘Although Tolstoy condemned the passions of greed, anger and lust as vigorously as any tub-thumping Puritan, he was no other-worldly moralist. He recommended the happiness which is to be found in a life close to nature, voluntary work, family, friendship and a painless death.’ Moreover, Tolstoy’s promotion of anarchistic pacifism stresses its impact on people’s well-being here and now. ‘He rejects the charge that without government there will be chaos or a foreign invasion. His experience of Cossack communities in the Urals had shown him that order and well-being are possible without the organized violence of government’ (Marshall 2008 [1992]: 370, 374).

Yet Orwell is using his picture of Tolstoy for essential rhetorical purposes – and as a foil against which he can deliver his wonderfully profound celebration of life – and the music of words of his hero, William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare not forgotten in Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Orwell’s last novel, the dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four (2000 [1949]), women are represented as both highly sexualised or the complete opposite – desexualised madonnas. In her essay, ‘Desire is Thoughtcrime’, Jenny Taylor highlights the novel’s ‘dichotomy between lust and utopian desire, between woman as Madonna and whore’ (1983: 28). Julia, the ‘girl from the Fiction Department’ – though perhaps also a Party spy engaged in a honeytrap operation – conducts a passionate, secret affair with Winston Smith. Yet in another crucial scene, Winston dreams of his mother, the good breast, as part of an Arcadian Golden age of plenitude. A girl comes towards him across the field. ‘With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside’ (op cit: 36). But her naked body arouses no desire in him. Rather ‘What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to an ancient time.’ And he concludes the scene triumphantly: ‘Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips’ (ibid).

This split in the representation of women, then, is highly problematic. Yet is it not significant that Orwell brings together the worlds of the unconscious, utopian desire and High Art with his final evocation of the name of Shakespeare?

Conclusions

Orwell’s love of the theatre begins in his childhood and remains constant throughout his life. It has been too often missed by biographers and Orwell scholars. Theatrical plot lines are dotted about – often wittily and imaginatively – A Clergyman’s Daughter. For instance, when Dorothy, while recovering from her breakdown, teaches at Mrs Creevy’s appalling school, Orwell has a great deal of fun describing the hoo-ha and parental protests that follow her class on Macbeth with its oh so controversial/shocking line ‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripp’d’ (1976 [1935]: 387). ‘I do so adore Macbeth,’ he writes to his friend Eleanor Jaques, on 18 November 1932 and is keen to take her to see a production at the Old Vic (Orwell and Angus 1970, 1: 130-131).

Orwell does not particularly distinguish himself during his stint as drama critic (1940-1941) but many of his reviews capture his sense of humour, his love of bawdy, Max Miller-ish jokes and show him playing with ideas later to be taken up in longer essays. Then while working at the BBC, his drama interests inevitably spill over into his output. Along with all his often inventive and highly original arts feature programmes and political commentaries, he designs thirteen courses based on Calcutta and Bombay University syllabuses in English and American literature, science, medicine, agriculture and psychology and runs a series introducing drama and the mechanics of production, backed up with shortened versions of Indian plays. According to Peter Davison: ‘This had a direct effect in that two participants, Balraj and Damyanti Sahni, set up a travelling drama company in India on their return’ (1996: 117).

Interestingly, his fascination with fairy stories is reflected in two dramatic adaptions he writes for the BBC – of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ while his own version of Animal Farm is broadcast in 1947.

Moreover, the work of dramatists such as Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and William Shakespeare is constantly reflected upon during his writing career (though D. H. Lawrence’s short stories and poems especially interest him rather than the plays). The Collected Works, edited by Peter Davison (1998), indicates more than 120 references to Shakespeare, 96 to Shaw, around 30 to Wilde and 11 to Chekhov. Even while fighting in the trenches alongside Republican militiamen during the Spanish civil war in 1937, Orwell is reported by his comrade, Douglas Moyle, to find time to read his favourite dramatist: ‘I was surprised to find him sitting quietly by himself, sheltering from the cold wind, reading a little volume of Shakespeare’s plays. He didn’t speak, and I realized he would rather be left alone’ (quoted in Wadhams 1984: 80).

From British Library’s blog on Olivier and Leigh’s Macbeth

Davison even suggests that the concept of ‘Doublethink’ (the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time) of Nineteen Eighty-Four could have been drawn from Macbeth. In this play, the Porter refers satirically to equivocation. Standing at the Door of Hell, the Porter asks who knocks: ‘Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven: O come in [to Hell] equivocator’ (Davison 1996: 132). An intriguing idea.

One thing is certain, however: for it’s the Bard’s sexiness and love of life that Orwell, the theatre man, celebrates so movingly and memorably in his essay ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’.

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Orwell's Politics and the English Language

From THE LANCETT:

Richard Horton

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GEORGE ORWELL, in his 1945 essay Politics and the English Language, wrote that “to think clearly is a necessary first step towards political regeneration”.

The Moscow press briefing held last week on the Russian COVID-19 vaccine quickly turned into a platform for national rivalry. The research, led by scientists at the N F Gamaleya National Research Centre for Epidemiology and Microbiology, found encouraging evidence of an immune response using their prime boost strategy of a two-component, human recombinant adenovirus vector-based vaccine. The study was small, non-randomised, uncontrolled, and did not include those most at risk of severe disease. The Russian team recognise these limitations and are proceeding with large randomised trials. The first results were released by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Aug 13. “I know that it works quite effectively”, he said, “forms strong immunity, and I repeat, it has passed all the needed checks”. At last week's event, more big claims were made. The “poorly researched approaches” by “western” nations were criticised, and one speaker challenged western governments to respond to these alleged concerns—“would you please show your citizens” evidence about the safety of western vaccine candidates given the “poorly developed platforms” you are using, he said. “It doesn't make any sense to use poorly researched approaches”, he argued. His view was that a human adenovirus vector was safer than a chimpanzee adenovirus vector (the basis for the Oxford COVID-19 vaccine, for example). A press conference to present the results of a scientific study became the venue for renewed Cold War conflict.

Russia isn't the only country to use COVID-19 as a tool to fight perceived adversaries. US President Donald Trump routinely refers to SARS-CoV-2 as the “China virus”. He is seeking to amplify the American public's fear of China to wound his opponent in the current presidential campaign. In Latrobe, PA, on Sept 3, President Trump suggested that, “Joe Biden wants to surrender your jobs to China”. The message is clear—China is America's enemy, it is the cause of a pandemic that has destroyed the US economy, and the policies of the Democrat candidate will only strengthen America's chief international competitor. There is not one shred of evidence to support these claims. The twisting of language in public discussion of the pandemic is now standard fare. “Thanks to the efforts of Operation Warp Speed”, said President Trump in Wilmington, NC, on Sept 2, “we remain on track to deliver a vaccine very rapidly, in record time”. He has suggested a vaccine might be available by the end of October—an important claim given that the US election will take place on Nov 3. Yet there is no possibility that a COVID-19 vaccine will be ready for public use before the US election. Orwell's reflection that language is used “with intent to deceive” in “the sordid processes of international politics” could not be more apposite.

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‘EVER HAD A WOMEN IN A PARK?’

by Brian Bamford

George Orwell and son Richard Blair

DAVID J. TAYLOR, sheltering from the blazing sun in the patio of The Garden House Studio at the Holt Festival on the 24th, July, addressed the logistics of George Orwell’s love life.  At one point he reminded us that Orwell had once asked a friend if he had ever had a woman in a park?  When the reply that came was ‘No!’; Orwell said ‘I have; no where else to go’.

Malcolm Muggeridge in his essay on Orwell entitled ‘A Knight of the Woeful Countenance’ writes:

‘Orwell characteristically held forth on the logistic difficulties which dogged the penurious amorist.  Where was he to go if he could not afford a hotel room and had no private accommodation at his disposal?  He himself, he said, had been forced through poverty to avail himself of public parks and recreation grounds.’

In The Garden House Studio

The occasion of this talk in Holt, Norfolk by Orwell’s award winning biographer David Taylor was an exhibition of the hitherto unpublished love letters from George Orwell to Eleanor Jacques in Southwold.  The letters involved a correspondence between them which began in mid-1931, and continued until the 13th, January 1936, after he had married Eileen. According to Taylor their sexual relationship concluded around the end of 1932.

In one earlier letter already published and written in October 1932, Orwell recalled old times:

'It was so nice of you to say that you looked back to your days with me with pleasure. I hope you will let me make love to you again sometime, but if you don't it doesn't matter. I shall always be grateful to your kindness to me.'

Another reminisces about ‘that day in the wood along past Blythbugh Lodge – you remember, where the deep beds of moss were – I shall always remember that, & your nice white body in the dark green moss.’

'The Blyth Estuary-A Creative Haven'

The title of the Holt event in the pictureses patio of the Garden Studio was 'The Blyth Estuary-A Creative Haven' stems from an area called Blythburgh located on the main A12, about 4 miles west of Southwold in Suffolk. It was a place where Orwell and Eleanor used to go bird nesting, and he was later to refer to these trips together in his letters.

Mr. Taylor said 'Orwell's novels reveal a fondness for plein air frolics: they probably had their origin here.' The situation between Eleanor and Orwell was immensely complicated because she was also involved with Dennis Collings, who she later married, and who was a close friend of Orwell. Taylor describes their situation in Southwold as a classic 'Jules et Jim' kind of ménage à trois.

Bernard Crick in his own biography 'George Orwell: A Life' wrote:

'Eric (Blair or George Orwell) was soon to enjoy what may have been his first serious affaire. It is not without its difficulties, geographical and economic as well as the need to avoid hurting his friend Dennis Collings.'

Another aspect of Orwell, not dwelled upon by Taylor, is that he had an obsessive sense of being physically unattractive, and according to Malcolm Muggeridge 'Orwell did not find relations with the opposite sex easy (who, by the way does?)'

In a sense his early life was spent in a matriarchal pit smothered by the women around him.  An isolated passage from a notebook, quoted by Crick (page 55), shows this:

'The conversations he overheard as a small boy, between his Mother, his aunt, his elder sister and their feminist friends. The way in which, without ever hearing any direct statement to that effect, and without more than a very dim idea of the relationship between the sexes, he derived a firm impression that women did not like men, that they looked upon them as a sort of large ugly, smelly and ridiculous animal, who maltreated women in every way, above all by forcing their attentions on them.' 

Questions of Copyright

Introducing the topic Mr. Taylor pointed to Richard Blair (the adopted son of George Orwell and Eileen Blair) sitting near the back, and members of Eleanor Jacques' family.  It's not clear who will have the copyright to the letters, as Richard is Orwell's beneficiary, but the letters are presently in the possession of the Jacques family.

On July 10th, 2018, The Sunday Times ran a story by D.J. Taylor no less, reporting that:
'Major literary finds rarely come more dramatic than the one uncovered at 23 Station Road, Southwold, Suffolk.  While the relatives of the late owner were clearing the house of her effects, they decided to explore the garden shed.  Here, amid piles of detritus going back half a century, they turned up a stout, buff envelope bearing the pencilled message “Letters to be destroyed EC”. Stuffed inside, and clearly extant, were 19 letters dating from the 1930s, some handwritten, a few carefully typed, each addressed to “Dearest Eleanor” and signed “Eric”.  “Eric”, it instantly became clear, was George Orwell.'

Mr. Taylor concluded his talk by justifying his role as a biographer, the search for details like the love letters. He said biographers have no hesitation in grabbing every morsel of information about their subject.

After the talk by Mr. Taylor, we chatted with Richard Blair about the event and Tameside Trade Union Council's decision to take out corporate affiliation to THE ORWELL SOCIETY. The Tameside Trades Council had had its eyes wide-open when it took the decision to identify with Orwell and common decency at a time when politics is at a low ebb.

A few days before we were in Holt the Daily Mail had reported that students at Manchester University had painted over Rudyard Kipling's venerated poem 'If'.   Bernard Crick claims Orwell drew upon Kipling's work when he wrote '1984'.  We mentioned the relevance of Orwell to the reports about the attacks on Kipling by the Manchester students as we bought a copy of David Taylor's biography.

In the exhibition of Orwell's letters to Eleanor we noted one that was typed that talked about him tutoring 'an imbecile', reading a book on poisonings in the USA which he said was psychologically interesting and Plutarch*, who he recommends to her. Curiously, Plutarch born Greek and later became a Roman citizen was also a biographer, and among his quotes is this one which is vintage Orwell:

Plutarch wrote:  'I don't need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod; my shadow does that much better.'  Which is of course vintage Orwell, and something these politically- correct students in Manchester could do well to consider.

* Plutarch, later named, upon becoming a Roman citizen, Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus, was a Greek biographer and essayist, known primarily for his Parallel Lives and Moralia. He is classified as a Middle Platonist. 

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QUENTIN KOPP RESPONDS!

Quentin Kopp 

Today, 19:55

Thanks Les good point

Brian, they are upstairs in the Museum of Wigan Life on Library Street.

I have attached a photo, which I took last year, that has the bonus of Les in the foreground. The room, apart from new chairs and raised lighting, would be immediately recognisable to Orwell and anyone else who had visited in the 1930s.

Thanks for giving The Orwell Society the publicity.  Tomorrow we are going to go to Jura to visit Barnhill, where he wrote most of Nineteen Eighty Four.

Cheers

Quentin

E-MAIL from EDITOR of ORWELL SOCIETY WEB

Brian,

Your members may also be interested to learn that Wigan Reference Library now has Peter Davison's Orwell library on long-term loan.  (In the same room in which Orwell researched the statistics underlying The Road to Wigan Pier).

http://www.orwellsociety.com/2018/05/18/wigan-library-presentation/

Regards,

Les Hurst (WEBSITE EDITOR)

Tameside TUC joins THE ORWELL SOCIETY

North West trade unionists merge with poet of common decency
by Brian Bamford

THIS year, Tameside Trade Union Council [TUC] in Greater Manchester became the first corporate affiliate of the ORWELL SOCIETY.  This SOCIETY is dedicated to the understanding and appreciation of George Orwell's life and work as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century.

The Society is a registered charity in the UK and it aims to keep the study of Orwell alive through its educational activities.  The Orwell Society is without political affiliation,and was founded in 2011, and though it is based in the UK its membership is worldwide.  George Orwell (the pen-name for Eric Blair; 1903-1950), was the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Society's intention is to embrace a grasp of Orwell's life and writings, from his literary criticism to his diaries, and from his political writings to his poetry. . 

Last Friday, the President of Tameside, Derek Pattison, announcing this said:  'In an Age of Post Truth, Fake News, and Alternative Facts, we need George Orwell's guidance more than ever.'  

When I attended the Annual General Meeting of the Orwell Society on the 28th, April this year, I spoke to Richard Blair, the son of George Orwell, and to Quintin Kopp, the son of George Kopp Orwell's commander as captain in the general staff of the 45th Mixed Brigade of the Spanish Republican Army.  Both were anxious to get more participation in the Society from trade unionists such as ourselves.

Since Tameside TUC  first published our booklet commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War in 2006, and followed this up with the unveiling of a blue plaque for James Keogh in 2011 who died fighting with the republicans in the Spanish Civil War, this trade union council has had a special interest in both George Orwell and his experiences of the Spanish Civil War.

Malcolm Muggeridge in his essay 'A Knight of the Woeful Countenance' wrote about this:
'I FIRST became aware of the existence of George Orwell in the middle thirties when I read some articles of his on the Spanish Civil War which appeared in the New English Weekly, a publication founded by A.R. Orage to expound the principles of Social Credit.  They provided the basis for Homage to Catalonia, one of his best books.  These articles made a great impression on me.  I liked their clear, simple style, and the obvious honesty of purpose which informed them,  They touched a chord of personal sympathy, too.  I saw in Orwell's strong reaction to the villainies of Communist apparat in Spain a compatible experience to my own disgust some years previously with the Soviet regime and its fawning admirers among the intelligentsia of the West as a result of a stint as Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian....'

When we at Tameside TUC began to produce and publish a balanced account of the Spanish Civil War  in 2006, we were confronted with resistance from some elements within the more narrow-minded political left of the trade union movement in Greater Manchester.   These people deliberately tried to stiffle our efforts and those of other local trade unionists to bring about publication.  Both Orwell and Muggeridge had had difficultes getting their articles published by the so-called progressive publishers like Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman and C.P. Scott at the Manchester Guardian, and perhaps even more absurd, was the Victor Gollancz rejection of Animal Farm.

Muggeridge relates how when Orwell and he were lunching together in a Greek restaurant in Percy Street, Orwell asked if he would mind changing places?  When Muggeridge asked him why?  Orwell just said 'he just couldn't bear to look at Kingsley Martin's corrupt face, which, as Kingsley was lunching at an adjoining table, was unavoidable from where he had been sitting before.'

I feel much the same when I am forced to gaze into the faces of Ronald Marsden and his friend Mike Luft of the International Brigade Memorial Trust:  two people who did their utmost to undermine the production of the Tameside TUC memorial booklet about the Spanish Civil War.

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Homage to Bob Smillie in Year of Orwell?

N,V. Editor:  A few days ago Quentin Kopp, son of George Kopp the commander of the POUM military unit in the Spanish civil war, mentioned the contraversial death of Bob Smillie at the the hands of the communists when he wrote to  Tameside Trade Union Council, which is now affiliated to The ORWELL SOCIETY, to relate the following news:

'We have been informed that Barcelona wants to make 2018 the year of Orwell and will be arranging a special series of plaques, which will comemorate his time there.  Despite the political uproar in Catalonia it appears to be still going ahead. Since we received this invitation we have learned that a Spanish researcher has found the graves and a lot of the records relating to the death of Bob Smillie. We plan to incorporate taking a small scuplture to Valencia to put in the Cemetry at the same time, which will be between the 14^th and 18^th April.'

Below is a report in THE SCOTSMAN in 2003 about Bob Smillie and George Orwell:

THE SCOTSMAN

It's time the Left faced up to the truth about Orwell

 Published: 01:00 Monday 23 June 2003

Read more at: https://www.scotsman.com/news/it-is-time-left-faced-up-to-the-truth-about-orwell-1-653034

FEW people in Scotland today remember Bob Smillie, but there was a time when his political murder by Communist Party agents during the Spanish Civil War was a cause célèbre.  During his lifetime, Orwell - otherwise Eric Blair, hence the silly Guardian pun - was vilified and lied about by the left-wing establishment for denouncing communism and its British fellow travellers as totalitarian enemies.  He came in for personal attack for two reasons.  First, he had been a leftist himself and had put his life on the line fighting against Franco in Spain: he was wounded and nearly killed.  If there is one thing the Marxist left can’t abide it’s one of their own exposing where the dead bodies are buried - literally, in Smillie’s case.  Second, Orwell’s brilliant prose - spare, honest, gripping - is some of the best anti-totalitarian propaganda ever written, be it the satire of Animal Farm or the Blade Runner world of Nineteen Eighty-Four.  So much so, that his works remain permanently in print and, more importantly, read.  That’s why I think Orwell, from the grave, will be proud that he is still upsetting the unthinking left.

However, it is ironic that today’s character assassination is being led by the Guardian, which Orwell singled out for praise in his Spanish Civil War memoir, Homage to Catalonia, for its exposure of the lies being spread about the democratic Spanish left during the war (they were accused of being fascists) by the manipulative communists.  Sixty-five years later, the Guardian is claiming that Orwell secretly informed on fellow writers and academics, including the Scots poet Hugh McDiarmid, whom he thought might be communist sympathisers.  And all because he was besotted by a woman called Celia Kirwan, who worked for the shady information research department at the Foreign Office.  Thus, says the Guardian, did the inventor of Big Brother turn into the monster he created (much like the liberal, free-market Manchester Guardian of Orwell’s day has become a public-sector advertising sheet).

The Guardian’s innuendo is false - which brings us back to murdered Bob Smillie.  He was the 22-year-old grandson of Robert Smillie, the leader of the Scottish miners.  The younger Smillie was a member of the radical Independent Labour Party (ILP).  Under its charismatic leader James Maxton (a hero of Gordon Brown), the ILP was resolutely pacifist.  But Franco’s attempt to overthrow the democratically elected left-wing government in Spain in 1936 changed all that.  Thousands of idealistic foreign volunteers, including Orwell and Smillie (then a student at Glasgow University), went to Spain to join the International Brigades to fight fascism.  There was only one problem - the communists.  While Stalin was prepared to arm the Spanish republican government against Franco, he was not in favour of a radical Spain, lest it got in the way of his plans for an anti-Hitler alliance with France and Britain.  The Soviet secret service (NKVD), including in its ranks many foreign communist militants, effectively took over republican Spain.  Anyone on their own side who got in the way was labelled a fascist, arrested, then shot.  That included supporters of the largest left-wing party in Spain, the Anarchist CNT.  But it also included the Catalan nationalists and ordinary social democrats, whose party was forcibly merged with the communists.  When, in May 1937, the Anarchists and the POUM - the Spanish partners of the ILP - objected to all this, the communists concocted the lie that these organisations were in league with Franco, and used military force in Barcelona to suppress them.  Orwell, who had been recovering from a bullet wound in the neck, escaped to France.  But Smillie was arrested by the NKVD at the border while on his way home to conduct an anti-fascist speaking tour. He was taken to a prison in Valencia and held incommunicado despite protests from the ILP in Britain. Subsequently, the communists announced Smillie had died on 13 June, 1937, from peritonitis. His body was immediately buried before anyone could see it.

Leading ILPers, such as John McNair, who was the party’s general secretary for 20 years, believed he had been deliberately shot (as were many POUM leaders).  Maxton went to Valencia to try to find out, but to no avail - the local communist press called him a fascist too.  Whether Smillie was executed, or died of deliberate neglect, he was the first foreigner associated with the International Brigades to become a mortal victim of Stalinist repression.  He should be a Scottish hero, but decades of Stalinist propaganda in the Scottish Labour movement have buried his memory.  Smillie’s death led Orwell to break with the romantic left of his day and denounce Stalinism, and with it the closed, self-certain mentality that supports such false utopias.  As a result, he was excoriated by the left. Even today, the Guardian is happy to run a front-page story implying that one of the 20th century’s greatest writers was merely a British equivalent of Senator McCarthy, and only then because he wanted to get his leg over.  The truth is that Orwell had seen his friends murdered and, unlike lazy, middle-class intellectuals in Britain, he was prepared to defend democracy in a typically robust way. By the way, that supposedly shady Foreign Office unit was actually set up in 1948 by the Labour foreign minister Ernest Bevin to counter Soviet propaganda - there were numerous communist agents inside the Parliamentary Labour Party. Orwell was advising on who would make a poor choice as a counter-propagandist. As to his assessments, consider McDiarmid, whom Orwell calls "reliably pro-Russian". Orwell died in 1950. In 1956, as Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian uprising and there were mass defections from the British Communist Party, McDiarmid rejoined it. Is this not all ancient history?  No: Orwell’s warning that "totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere" is still in force as long as there are those happily inventing utopias to impose on the rest of us. We need to remain robust in defending freedom, and that is done best by remembering people such as Bob Smillie.

In Spain in the past few years, there has emerged a popular movement to uncover the true facts about those who disappeared during the civil war.  The Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory wants the Spanish government to dig up and identify the corpses of the 30,000 people believed to have been executed by the fascists.  Why stop there? What about the executions in Spain by the communist secret police?  The time has come to solve the mystery of Bob Smillie’s death.  Where is he buried? Was he shot in the back of the head with a Mauser machine pistol, the method of choice of the NKVD?  Or was he just allowed to die in agony of peritonitis?  And who were the Scottish Comintern agents who informed on him?  Perhaps the Guardian has started a trend.

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