WHITTAKER CHAMBERS WAS PROBABLY ILL TOO

Blacklisted writer says illness clouded Orwell's judgement: Survivor tells Guardian that author was 'losing his grip' (Fiachra Gibbons, June 24, 2003, The Guardian)

A founding member of the SDP who appeared on George Orwell's list of communist sympathisers yesterday dismissed it as the work of a dying man whose mind was clouded by illness and bitterness about the Spanish Civil War.

Professor Norman Mackenzie, now 82 - and the only known surviving member of the 38 "crypto-communists and fellow travellers" who Orwell claimed should not be trusted - said the writer was gravely ill with TB and "losing his grip on himself" when he handed over the list to a murky Foreign Office propaganda unit in 1949. [...]

"Tubercular people often could get very strange towards the end. I'm an Orwell man, I agreed with him on the Soviet Union, but he went partly ga-ga I think. He let his dislike of the New Statesman crowd, of what he saw as leftish, dilettante, sentimental socialists who covered up for the Popular Front in Spain [after it became communist-controlled] get the better of him."

The fact that the magazine's editor was Kingsley Martin, who rejected Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's dispatches from Spain, where he survived being shot in the neck, may have been the root of his loathing. "[The list] represents everything he hated about the New Statesman - that it was full of fluffy-headed fellow travellers and that it was intellectually dishonest, which is probably true."

Of course he can't have fingered themn because he thought the Left was a threat. That would mean...oh, never mind.

MORE:
Orwell Up Close: On the 100th anniversary of his birth, a clutch of new biographies explores the wintry genius of George Orwell - a hero claimed by left and right (DONALD MORRISON, June 30, 2003, TIME Europe) Posted by Orrin Judd at June 26, 2003 9:45 PM