Keeping an eye on Auden and Orwell Alex Danchev James Smith BRITISH WRITERS AND MI5 SURVEILLANCE 1930–1960 206pp. Cambridge University Press. £55. 978 1 107 03082 4 Published: 3 July 2013 Auden, Day-Lewis and Spender W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis and Stephen Spender during the Pen Club Conference, 1949 Photograph: Hulton Picture Company I n 1941 Eric Blair became a temporary Talks Producer in the Indian Section of the BBC’s Eastern Service, charged with shoring up support for the Allied war effort among the Indian intelligentsia. Blair himself was acutely conscious of the moral minefield into which he forward-marched. “If I broadcast as George Orwell I am as it were selling my literary reputation, which so far as India is concerned probably arises chiefly from books of anti-imperialist tendency.” It was precisely that reputation which attracted the BBC – “the propaganda advantages of Orwell’s name are obvious”, as a management memo put it. The organs of the state sought to claim him and perhaps to tame him, or at least to vet him and to chain him. The BBC was in every sense an Orwellian world. At first there was surprisingly little difficulty. The vetting form in Orwell’s MI5 file (KV 2/2699) was stamped “Nothing recorded Against”. Then Special Branch got to work: “This man has advanced communist views, and several of his Indian friends say that they have often seen him at communist meetings. He dresses in bohemian fashion both at his office and in his leisure hours”. Interestingly enough, this sort of stuff did not wash with MI5, where pockets of more sophisticated understanding co-existed with uniform suspicion. An officer called Ogilvie gave Special Branch short shrift: “I gathered that the good Sergeant was rather at a loss as to how he could describe this rather individual line, hence the expression ‘advanced communist views’. This fits in with the picture we have of Blair @ Orwell [sic]. It is evident from his recent writings – ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ and his contribution to [Victor] Gollancz’s symposium ‘The Betrayal of the Left’ – that he does not hold with the Communist Party nor they with him . . . . Blair undoubtedly has strong Left Wing views but he is a long way from orthodox Communism.” Ogilvie was a foot soldier or file bearer in what we have come to call information warfare. Perhaps he was one of its unsung heroes. Not only was he well read; he was also remarkably sensible. For better or worse, he had a hand in recruiting a number of celebrated writers for the kind of work that metamorphosed into the cultural Cold War. “Stephen Spender, like several other young and progressive thinkers, joined the Communist Party in the days of the united front [c.1937] because he saw in this the only way to combat fascism”, Ogilvie assessed in 1943. “His behaviour and writings of recent years show that he is no longer in sympathy with communism and will in fact have nothing more to do with them. There is no security objection to his employment by PWE on the Continent.” It was but a short step from the Political Warfare Executive to the editorship of Encounter. Files are always hungry. Once opened, they demand to be fed British Writers and MI5 Surveillance is a book about the mentalities of national security and the exigencies of individual conscience. Put differently, it is about wars and the rumours of wars – turf wars and real wars – but more especially about files and the consequences of files. It is based on recently released Security Service (MI5) files, now available in the National Archives, and primarily on the personal files of certain selected writers. James Smith offers case studies of the “Auden circle” (in this instance, Spender, W. H. Auden, C. Day-Lewis and Christopher Isherwood, though not Louis MacNeice, who seems not to have merited an MI5 file); Ewan MacColl, Joan Littlewood and Theatre Workshop; and George Orwell and Arthur Koestler, treated as comparators or foils. Of these, it is the surveillance and courtship of Orwell and Koestler that makes for the most intriguing study, largely because of their active involvement (or complicity) in the machinations – Koestler in particular moved like a double agent among the big concepts, as Seamus Heaney once wrote of himself. Files are always hungry. Once opened, they demand to be fed. Weeded and redacted as they may be, these files reveal something of the negotiations that fattened them. James Smith impresses on us the greyer, grimier reality of compromise. Orwell and Koestler and others were not only suspects, they were also assets – Smith uses the word without registering its full meaning in this context – “freelance consultants” in the cultural Cold War. The files testify to the lies and silences of the secret state, and also to its limitations. Big Brother is human, all too human, after all. This is a good story, but it could have been an even better one. The British worked hand in glove with the Americans; our files talked to their files. The buzz among the cousins is almost inaudible here. And Ogilvie himself might have entered a protest at the lumpen prose. Alex Danchev is Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham and the author, most recently, of Cézanne: A Life, 2012. His new translation of Cézanne’s letters is due to be published later this year.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Jul 2013 13:37:11 +0000
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