ORWELL AS PROPAGANDIST

...He was inhibited by his audience—educated Indians who lived thousands of miles from the European situation and may not have been tuning in anyway...

...So the question of progress becomes a question of what kind of progress...

...The BBC's] atmosphere is something halfway between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless...

...When a writer engages in politics he should do so as a citizen, as a human being, but not as a writer . . . Whatever else he does in the service of his party, he should never write for it . . . There is no reason why he should not write in the most crudely political way, if he wishes to...

...Why not accept this rather than believing that one hasty radio script led to so complex a political fable...

...By the time he wrote "Writers and Leviathan," he had left behind that wearying experience and had nearly finished 1984...

...But during the war, following the intensely political decade of the 1930s, almost every important writer in Britain had a public role...

...West makes a lot out of Orwell's radio adaptation of "The Fox," a short story by Ignazio Silone...

...Only he should do so as an individual, an outsider, at the most an unwelcome guerrilla on the flank of a regular army...

...Among the better pieces are those on Shaw, Wilde, and Macbeth, and an essay on Jack London in which Orwell says, "He could foresee the rise of Fascism, and the cruel struggles which would have to be gone through, because of the streak of brutality which he had in himself' (is there a small portion of self-description in this...

...But here Orwell the socialist argues—against himself—the case for material progress, recognizing that "the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time...

...And the answer suggests that the most interesting aspect of The Lost Writings is not in its contents but in such a book's existing at all...

...W. J. West, a British scholar, now argues that Orwell was wrong about the worth of his wartime experiences: that "the key to Orwell's evolution from the slightly pedantic and unpolished author of prewar days lies in the two years he spent as a Talks Producer in the Indian Section of the BBC's Eastern Service from August 1941 until November 1943...

...Elsewhere Orwell wrote that socialists must admit that once economic security has been assured the "problem of man's place in the universe will still remain...

...Thus, in letters and diaries, George Orwell described his two years of broadcasting to India for the wartime BBC...

...Contemporaries like George Woodcock sharply criticized him for doing propaganda work, and today the popular image of Orwell as hater of official lies makes it hard to understand how he could write a letter requesting "something about the extortions of the Japanese, looting, raping, and the opium traffic etc...

...Even the best of The Lost Writings lack the wit and insight that by then were the trademark of Orwell's print journalism...

...while the worst are full of passionate intensity, and advocate positions whose bloody results they know will never be attributed to them...

...And it is a sign of the distance separating us from Orwell's age that writers today hardly think about the dilemma at all...

...Under the title The Lost Writings, West has published sixteen of them, along with a lengthy introduction, and twohundredodd letters Orwell wrote to various contributors to his radio program...

...Although he insisted he never broadcast anything he "would not have said as a private individual," censorship inevitably restricted and irritated him...

...At the BBC Orwell found himself not "an unwelcome guerrilla" but an officer directing some rather ineffective assaults...

...124 When war broke out Orwell did everything he could to enlist, but was found unfit because of the lung disease that eventually killed him...

...But it would be a mistake to think Orwell was completely hostile to government and serving the state...

...But if there is proof that the BBC period was "the key to Orwell's evolution," we don't have it yet...

...125...

...I have left the BBC after two wasted years in it...

...Best of all is an imaginary interview with Jonathan Swift, in which Orwell and Swift debate the theme of progress: he gives to Swift the voice of doubt, to himself the voice of belief, but both are essentially Orwell, hashing out the question of whether the machine age has been beneficial or destructive...

...and any admirer of Orwell's writing wishes West success...

...The book leaves us with this question: Why did Orwell do it for so long...

...also, he wrote while two officials from the Ministry of Information looked over his shoulder—the "Policy" censor and the "Security" censor...

...He must have decided that doing propaganda for the BBC had value...

...Still, certain of these pieces are almost up to the level of his published essays, and the book as a whole—strangely, by its shortcomings—opens up some thoughts about Orwell and the position of the political writer in his time...

...There was another Orwell at this time, the Orwell of "England Your England" and "My Country Right or Left," who scorned pacifism and believed that England—the hidden England of clerks and factory workers—was worth saving...

...He accepted the BBC offer with relief...

...The interview is imaginative and deeply felt—the only piece in the book that can stand with Orwell's most polished essays...

...Orwell insists "the poorest person nowadays is better off, so far as physical comfort goes, than a nobleman in Saxon times, or even in the reign of Queen Anne," but Swift counters, "Has that added anything to true wisdom or true refinement...

...Reading the scripts, one feels his sense of futility sapping almost every page...

...It is legitimate for a scholar to challenge a writer's evaluation of his own work or experience...

...West unearthed the evidence for this in 1984 in the archives of the BBC—over sixty scripts and news commentaries prepared by Orwell...

...Others reached the same conclusion: the leading writers and intellectuals of the day—Eliot, Spender, Empson, Forster, Herbert Read—parade through the broadcasts, committing themselves and their work to a slightly demeaning forum and without pay...

...In short, not wasted years at all...

...It is a witness, not through moments of insight or great writing, but through the sheer accumulation of broadcasts and letters, through its existence in the first place, to the age and the writer's beleaguered life...

...A lot of bad writing resulted, but also a level of political involvement that is now nearly unthinkable...

...But Orwell himself explained that the idea for the book came to him one day six years before it was written, when he saw a boy beating a cart-horse and wondered what would happen if animals became aware of their power to rise up against their human masters...

...Because Orwell began Animal Farm two months after the broadcast of the story, whose allegorical subplot—a fox stealing into a chicken coop—is similar to a minor incident at the end of the first chapter of Animal Farm, we are told "The Fox" "inspired Orwell to write Animal Farm...

...In "Writers and Leviathan," an essay written after the war, Orwell took up the theme of the hazards of political activity for writers: We should draw a sharper distinction than we do at present between our political and our literary loyalties, and should recognise that a willingness to do certain distasteful but necessary things does not carry with it any obligation to swallow the beliefs that usually go with them...

...The bleakness, the sense of moral squalor, the disgust with bureaucracy and propaganda in his last book have some of their roots in the years of The Lost Writings...

...IT MAY BE HARD FOR US TO IMAGINE SUCh widespread sense of sacrifice to a larger, national cause...

...Instead of engaging in "distasteful but necessary things," the best generally lack conviction, commenting on politics only to affirm their moral superiority to the fools who make decisions...

...That is its greatest—paradoxically, negative—value...