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Ten The Reluctant Propagandist These two book reviews described Orwell’s work at the BBC during World War II and his movement from idealism to disillusionment. The first volume contains sixteen political and literary programs, and one hundred pages of his letters. There are also scrappy radio talks by Forster, Eliot and William Empson. Though Orwell was forced to lie and felt that this propaganda had damaged his integrity, his efforts were useless and his talks did not reach their audience. The second volume contains forty-nine news talks to India. Orwell was shocked by the massacre of Jews in Poland and by the Japanese atrocities in the Far East, and he makes a number of shrewd prophecies. Though I’m not a conservative, I wrote fifty-five reviews for the National Review in the 1980s. It was edited by William Buckley, who always sent me encouraging notes (“good going”) and copies of his books. I stopped writing for Buckley when he spiked my criticism of his hero Evelyn Waugh and published an unfair attack on my review of Nabokov without giving me a chance to reply. I In the 1970s, when I studied the Orwell papers at the British Broadcasting Company archives in Reading, England, I was given a radically incomplete file. In the early 1980s the amateur scholar William J. West, searching for material on C. K. Ogden’s Basic English, accidentally found that radio talks by Orwell—a producer in the Indian section from August 1941 until November 1943—had been mysteriously misfiled under the name of the Indian lady who introduced the program.This eventually led to West’s astonishing discovery of many of Orwell’s weekly war commentaries (to be published 102 part ii. the art in a later volume), of sixteen political and literary talks and adaptations, and one hundred pages of correspondence. In 1984 West published Orwell’s literary talks, with the letters to his contributors, as Orwell: The Lost Writings . Unfortunately, this impersonal, routine and repetitive correspondence could have been written by any bureaucrat. Though Orwell was born in India and had been a policeman in Burma, he seemed too independent and outspoken for this essential but soul-destroying war work. His novel Burmese Days had been banned in India, and in “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (June 1943) he wrote: “Official warpropaganda , with its disgusting hypocrisy and self-righteousness, always tends to make thinking people sympathize with the enemy.” This volume, like his later novels, charts his progress from idealism to disillusionment. Orwell complains about the desperate search for appropriate subjects, laments the poor quality of the transmissions (“it was a complete muckup and consisted largely of scratching noises”), maintains the “broadcasts are utterly useless because nobody listens to them,” notes in his diary that he is forced to lie for propaganda purposes but denies this in his letter of resignation. He is frustrated by the impossibility of getting anything done and feels like “an orange that’s been trodden on by a very dirty boot”—a brutal image that recurs in his essays and in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He must leave in order to“be near-human again and able to write something serious.” Still, the BBC was not all bad. It continued to pay Hitler royalties, during the war, for excerpts from Mein Kampf. West’s sound introduction to this small-print edition (though marred by a dozen minor errors) shows that Orwell’s biographer was ignorant of the BBC background and (despite Orwell’s complaints) that these years were not wasted.West usefully confirms that Basic English influenced the creation of Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four; that wartime censorship inspired the portrayal of Winston Smith’s work; that Senate House, the headquarters of the Ministry of Information (which controlled censorship), was the physical model for the Ministry of Truth; and that its chief, Brendan Bracken, known as “BB,” was the forerunner of Big Brother. But West’s claim that Orwell’s adaptation of Ignazio Silone’s story “The Fox” (September 1943) “directly inspired him to write Animal Farm” is not convincing. The inspiration, as Orwell states (and West quotes), came before the war; and Silone’s work, in any case, is entirely different from Orwell’s. The material in this volume is of uneven interest.The content of the broadcasts , like Comrade Napoleon’s speeches to the farm animals, is extremely over-simplified. Despite the contributions of T. S. Eliot,William Empson, and E. M. Forster (whose...

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