Peter Stansky - The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War

THE SOCIALIST PATRIOT

George Orwell and War

PETER STANSKY

stanford briefs

An Imprint of Stanford University Press

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

2023 by Peter Stansky. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Stansky, Peter, 1932 author.

Title: The socialist patriot : George Orwell and war / Peter Stansky.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford Briefs, an imprint of Stanford University Press, 2023.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022043689 (print) | LCCN 2022043690 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503635494 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503635746 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Orwell, George, 19031950Political and social views. | Orwell, George, 19031950Criticism, interpretation, etc. | War and literatureGreat Britain--History20th century.

Classification: LCC PR6029.R8 S73 2023 (print) | LCC PR6029.R8 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022043689

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022043690

Cover design: Kevin Barrett Kane

Cover photo: Alamy, Editorial Royalty Free

Typeset by Classic Typography in 11/15 Adobe Garamond

CONTENTS

TO JOE AND ROBIN

Mr. Orwell is a revolutionary who is in love with 1910.

Cyril Connolly reviewing Animal Farm in Horizon September 1945

PREFACE

Writing about George Orwell: An Autobiographical Introduction

In this study my intention is to discuss how and why George Orwell not only participated in but was also deeply influenced and shaped by the wars that he was involved in during his lifetime: the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, and the beginnings of the Cold War. But before doing so, as a preface it might be useful to account how it came about that Ive been writing and thinking about George Orwell for more than seventy years, longer than Orwells sadly short life.

It began some months before he died in January 1950, aged only forty-six. I read Nineteen Eighty-Four when it was first published in my senior year in high school, as a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club to which my parents belonged. When growing up I also had an interest in the Spanish Civil War, sparked by my love of an album of its songs performed, if I remember correctly, by a chorus made up of German volunteers in the International Brigade.

The next step in my education was going to Yale where I became a history major, particularly interested in the history of Britain. I was fascinated by how British politics, society, culture, and the arts could mesh. In their own characteristic way they combined the ideological and the personal. This was reinforced by the generally Anglophile atmosphere at Yale. Although I was in no way involved with it, this was exemplified by the great publication project there of the letters of Horace Walpole. I became friends of graduate students who worked on that series. I was also much influenced by my classmate Russell Thomas, a nephew of the famous American editor, Maxwell Perkins, who seemed to be full of British literary gossip which we exchanged with others in our juvenile way over cups of tea in the Elizabethan Club or in a boozier fashion fueled by too much cheap sherry. There was also a lovely coincidence (Ive always had a fascination with serendipity, a word invented by Horace Walpole). Bernard Knox, the teacher of a fantastic course on the Greek plays, had fought with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Also, I took an excellent seminar in my junior year taught by Leonard Krieger for those who were doing honors work in history. Im not sure how it came about, but I wrote for it a paper on John Cornford who had fought and died in Spain, the great-grandson of Charles Darwin and son of the distinguished classicist Francis Cornford and his wife the poet Frances Cornford. It was also the occasion for my one slight brush with the McCarthyism of the period. In my paper I mentioned that Bernard Knox had been a military comrade of Cornfords in Spain. It was no secret as he had written about this experience in the memorial volume published after Cornfords death. Professor Krieger, who would be the only one who would see the paper, suggested that it was unwise to mention Bernard Knox in it as it might somehow get him in trouble in those 1950s Red Scare days.

My senior year would be largely devoted to writing my senior essay. I cant quite remember how my topic evolved, but it was about four Englishmen and how they were involved in the Spanish Civil War: John Cornford, Julian Bell, Stephen Spender, and George Orwell. It was not expected that such a work would be based on archival sources. As undergraduates in those days, we wouldnt travel for our research. In any case at that time hardly any primary material was available for any of these individuals. But there were sufficient printed sources for the purposes of my project. There was the Cornford memorial volume, and I spoke to Bernard Knox. Following Professor Kriegers advice I did not mention him in my work. Even some years later he didnt want to be identified by name as having fought in Spain. But eventually he published a series of excellent essays about the war. In one of them he mentioned that a Yale undergraduate had once exclaimed to him with excitement: Youre my thesis! It must have been me. Stephen Spender had published in 1951 his memoir, World Within World. He had not fought in the war but had been closely involved in it. Julian Bell, the son of Vanessa Bell and the nephew of Virginia Woolf, had gone to Spain as an ambulance driver but had been killed when a bomb hit his vehicle. There was a memorial book about him, and in the early 1950s the ever growing interest in Bloomsbury was beginning. Most important George Orwells Homage to Catalonia had been reissued in 1952 just as I was embarking on my senior essay. It had not sold well when it had been originally published in 1938 as the Right, by definition, didnt like it, and it also went against the then dominant Left interpretation of the war, much influenced by the Communist position. It is a brilliant and wonderful book, but its late success was helped by the Cold War. It was legitimately one of the Cold Wars weapons because of its intense anti-Communism based on the Russian undermining of the cause of the Republic in Spain. In my senior essay I wanted to assess the significance of these four men, their backgrounds, and how and why they were involved in the Spanish Civil War. To do so I found myself increasingly committed to that exploration and much enjoying finding out as much as I could about their life stories leading up to their going to Spain. Cornford and Bell had died in Spain; their lives were cut tragically short at a young age, Cornford at twenty-one, Bell at twenty-nine.

Orwell had died at forty-six in January 1950. Spender was still alive, and some years later I would meet him. Orwell had become world famous with the publication of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, but the considerable Orwell literature and the systematic publication of his work had hardly begun. In fact that provided part of the fun of my research as I found it quite enjoyable to be able to wander the stacks of the Yale Library and track down the relevant fugitive Orwell publications in various periodicals. My very first publication, other than columns I wrote for the