George Orwell, Jimi Hendrix and Grosvenor Square:

interview with John Newsinger

RH Can you tell me something about your own background?

JN Well, I come off a council estate and my parents were both working in industry. My dad was a labourer, my mum was a machinist. I went to a grammar school then I went to university. I worked in industry for a number of years. I was a schoolteacher for 14 years and I’ve been an academic for 23 years. I’m retired but I’m still on the university’s books for one day a week.

RH In Bath Spa?

JN Yeah. Yeah.

RH Is that easy with living in Portslade?

JN Well, I never go there. It’s what I call ‘distance research’. So they get my research when I’m on their books. Which is, I’m sure, mutually satisfying.

RH Right. So, were you inspired to become an academic by your family background?

JN Not really. Not really.

RH Your family weren’t politically active?

JN Oh, no. No. When I look back they were involved in making enormous sacrifices in terms of something they didn’t really have a grasp of. They were very hard up in the Sixties and early Seventies. My father was a casual labourer at that time; he didn’t have a permanent job. But the decision was made to let me stay on into the Sixth Form and looking back on it that was an enormous decision on their part. When I went to university I thought about becoming an academic, but not all that seriously and it was only when I was teaching in a school that I thought it would be really good to investigate things in depth and write about them. And it was – I enjoyed teaching in a school, so I assumed I’d enjoy teaching at a university. That was what led me to try and make the break. And in fact I published a number of things when I was a schoolteacher, which was what got me out of school and into university.

Happy days

RH You went to Hull initially [as a student].

JN Yes.

RH And you’re part of the generation of 1968.

JN Absolutely. I did a year at Manchester then I transferred over to Hull.

RH What subjects were you studying?

JN History and politics. I did one year there [in Manchester]. In those years it was so easy – not easy – but they smoothed your path. I failed a language exam at Manchester and I got on to the local authority and said I wanted to transfer to Hull – where they didn’t have that exam – and I did get three years from scratch in Hull. The fees paid and a grant, so I got four years of grant. There were no raised eyebrows even.

RH Yes.

JN In those days. All seems to long ago!

RH Yes. So, you were living in Essex at that stage?

JN Yeah. An estate called Harold Hill. Or ’arold Hill as –

RH What was the grammar school like?

JN The Royal Liberty Grammar School. It was a boys’ school. I mean, I owe them a lot. I didn’t really enjoy it until the Sixth Form, particularly English – not History – History was incredibly boring. But English I really liked. But it those days you couldn’t study English at hardly any university unless you had a foreign language – and a lot of them wanted Latin. And I was terrible at languages, so I ended up doing History where there were two universities that let you without a language qualification, one was Manchester where you had to get it at the end of the first year and the other was Hull where you didn’t have to get it at all.

RH Would you have rather studied English?

JN I would at the time, but in retrospect I think fate chose the best path.

RH Were you interested in fiction? At that time.

JN Oh, I have always been very interested in fiction. In the Sixth Form, the first year Sixth at the grammar school, they took us to the Aldwych Theatre to see The Persecution and Murder of Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Charenton Asylum.

RH Yes! I know it, yes.

JN And I had never been to the theatre before in my life – and that was my introduction to live theatre! And it was one of the formative cultural experiences of my life without a doubt.

RH ‘The more you scratch the more you itch.’

JN Oh, I thought it was tremendous. Absolutely breathtaking.

RH Not all theatre is like that.

JN No, no.

RH Did you take part in any notable demos as a student?

JN Yes. Yes. All of them, just about. All the Vietnam demos –

RH Were you in the ‘Battle of Grosvenor Square’? [protest outside US Embassy, 17 March 1968]

JN The ‘scuffle’ I think would be a better word for it. The scuffle at Grosvenor Square.

RH I’ve often wondered what happened to all the people who took part in those demonstrations. Hundreds of –

JN Well, you know – what was his name? – the bloke who helped Blair, I think he was head of MI[6] – He was chairman of the joint intelligence committee at the time. His name escapes me. [John Scarlett] But he was on the anti-war demo. And lo and behold later on he’s one of the people who smoothes the path for the invasion of Iraq.

RH You felt it [the protest] was rather exaggerated?

JN Well, it was very militant at the time in the sense that wherever Harold Wilson spoke you would have demonstrations against him, is my memory – because of the Vietnam War. But the violence was absolutely wildly exaggerated. There were scuffles with the police, which were sort of Saturday night scuffles in the town centre, but because they took place in Grosvenor Square, I think, it was exaggerated out of all proportion. The media leapt on –

RH The policemen riding piebald horses, if I remember – there was a film of the [demonstration shown on Channel 4] –

JN I was there! And they rode horses into the crowd. We were very annoyed at the time by what they were doing. We were shouting all sorts of abuse and that, but it was really, you know, compared with what was going on in other countries it was nothing – society was not in danger.

RH Yes.

JN - from us. I would say. In retrospect certainly not.

RH You were a member of the International Socialists? And that developed into the SWP.

JN It did. I can’t remember when, but it did.

RH Right. Have you stuck with them since?

JN I’m still a member after more than forty years.

RH Did you have any famous contemporaries in the music scene? Or anything like that?

JN No, no.

RH You weren’t really part of the Sixties counterculture?

JN Oh, no. No. I mean at Hull University there was a wide spectrum, there was almost, I suppose you’d call them a Yippy element, who were extremely hippyish, but also quite involved politically. But we went to see bands and things like that. I saw Captain Beefheart live.

RH Was he good?

JN He was very good until he collapsed on the stage.

RH This was in Hull, was it?

JN This was in Manchester. But you know, you were there like – not so much Captain Beefheart – there’d be Young Conservatives there. Young people were there full stop. And the universities did attract all the big bands in those days. Sometimes you were spoilt for choice. Specially in Manchester. Manchester University, the, um, Poly? Manchester School of Art and the Manchester technology place.

RH UMIST.

JN They’d all have a top band on. You know. I think one Saturday you had a choice of The Move – who were big at the time – Jimi Hendrix and The Cream. Of those three, silly sod, I went to see The Move! I mean, I saw Hendrix and Cream on other occasions – but I went to see The Move! Can’t believe it in retrospect. They weren’t bad, but it’s not something you want to admit to so much today, is it? Specially in reference to the other two.  

RH And of course Hull was the home to Philip Larkin at the time.

JN Yep.

RH Did you ever see him around the place?

JN He – I did bump into him once. Literally. He wasn’t a very pleasant person.

RH No.

JN You got the impression that my touching him – because we were pushed into each other – was – his response wasn’t ‘ugh!’ but you did get the impression that he didn’t like undergraduates particularly. They had the highest library fines, I think, of any university in the country, which I blame on him personally. [laughter]

RH Expression of his personality!

JN I can’t help feeling that, you know. John Saville spoke highly of him. Do you know John Saville, the ex-Communist Party Marxist historian? He always spoke highly of the help that Larkin gave him.

RH Do you think the Sixties was a special period?

JN It opened up higher education to a section of working class kids like me. That was a social revolution of sorts. I must admit that at the time we thought things were going to get better and better. And there came a point where I would say in fact things started getting worse and worse and worse.

RH So you went to Leicester?

JN Yep.

RH And you were doing a Masters there?

JN I did PGCE.

RH Right.

If there is hope…

JN Then I did an MA in mass media, then I went into teaching and what happened was the local authority introduced a scheme whereby you could apply for a year off to do a research project and I applied to do a research project at Leicester University on George Orwell. While I never completed it at the time, ’cos of domestic circumstances – we had two little kids – that interfered with the work, nevertheless that prepared the ground -

RH Yes.

JN - for George Orwell. I’d been interested in Orwell since I was a student and of all the left groups the IS [International Socialists] was the group most sympathetic to Orwell. Have you ever come across Peter Sedgwick’s article on Orwell? ["George Orwell: International Socialist?" (1969).]

RH I know the name.

JN Oh, well, he’s best known for translating Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary.

RH Right.

JN But – I can’t remember – it was years and years ago, I think it must have been in the early Seventies, he had an article on Orwell in the International Socialism journal and that was a revelation to me. I’d always admired Homage to Catalonia, although I must admit I never thought much of Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal Farm and I think Sedgwick’s article together with Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus’ four volumes [Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters] –

RH Yeah.

JN - they opened – I think this is a general phenomenon that a whole number of young people on the left, they opened up a new Orwell. Not the Cold War Orwell. I think Sedgwick led the way. But those four volumes, I’ve still got them upstairs – absolutely tremendous.

RH So what initially interested you in him [Orwell] as a student?

JN I suppose Homage to Catalonia. It – when you think back then, the student left in the main, not the Communists, but the student left was opposed to the Americans in Vietnam and the Russians in Czechoslovakia, in Eastern Europe and whatever Orwell seemed to be someone who at least, at some points, held that stance.

I mean I would qualify that very seriously today because his trajectory, you know, is what’s important – he changes his mind as circumstances change. But at the time, based on Homage to Catalonia, Orwell seemed to be a socialist, who would have been anti-Communists in Czechoslovakia – I know it’s always dubious to project the bloke forward like that – but also anti-the Americans in Vietnam.

And Orwell seemed to speak to that in a way that not many people on the British left did. So that I think was the attraction initially.

RH One of the things that stood out in your [book] Orwell’s Politics is that he had gone through this sort of early Communist phase when he was in Paris.

JN Yeah. Yeah.

RH In the late Twenties.

JN Yeah.

RH Presumably there’s no [evidence] – well, he wrote for various left-wing publications.

JN That’s right.

RH About Burma and poverty in England, I think, things of that sort. He’s supposed to have written two novels that have been lost. 

JN Disappeared, yeah.

RH On the point of marrying some French girl who then robbed him and disappeared..

JN [chuckles] For which he had to work in the kitchen –

RH Yes. And one would like to know a little bit more about all that, but. I suppose it’s all disappeared in the mists of time.

JN That’s right. That’s right. And also when you look at some of the stuff you get him writing about demonstrations in Paris – no, in Marseilles – when he gets back he visits Marseilles on his way back to England initially and there’s a big demonstration in support of Sacco and Vanzetti and he says you can’t imagine this in Britain. You know. Even at that point the politics are more left-wing than he admits to publicly.

RH Yes.

JN And he might well have abandoned that particular stance as well of course. But when he comes to write Down and Out it – I think he almost adopts it as a pose of innocence as far as politics is concerned. But of course we don’t know – apparently he used to have fierce arguments about the Communists and we don’t know whether his politics – this political phase – just waned and then later on revived in the Thirties, by the Great Depression or whatever. We don’t know. But he never really admitted that phase of his life, it was rediscovered by Crick and Davison – ’cos Davison’s published all the stuff from the French magazines which is very valuable.

RH And there isn’t very much from the first half of the Thirties.

JN No.

RH Obviously there’s the novels that he wrote, correspondence with Gollancz and his agent and that sort of thing.

JN I think the Adelphi magazine’s very important as well.

RH They sent him off to Wigan – or facilitated that trip.

JN If I was going to say what would be one of the most helpful things would be in terms of new Orwell research, a good study of the Adelphi magazine would be valuable.

RH Yes.

JN But I don’t think anyone’s working on that at the minute. That would be immensely helpful.

RH I have looked at them in the Bodleian Library and it’s interesting that he appears as E. A. Blair and then about 1934 George Orwell replaces him. The actual changeover occurs from one article to the next.

JN I’ve always felt as well that when you say this is the difference between History and English, that what you get with people from an English background, when they look at Orwell they tend to look at him from – what would you say? – a canonical point of view: ‘these are Orwell’s writings’ whereas I think a historian is much more likely to look at it, ‘this is what Orwell wrote to the Adelphi’ and to look at the magazine, much more than the English specialist is likely to do. And I must admit, you know, obviously I’m biased, but that’s the right way to do it.

RH Yes.

JN Because you get a much better idea of the influences on him, you know, and, also of course when you write for a magazine you do tailor your writing to that magazine –

RH Yes.

JN - to some extent. So that even that is an influence on him. So, it’s a shame, as I think the Adelphi could – and a number of people involved in it were big influences on his life – 

RH Yes.

JN - Richard Rees, for example. These are friends for life. So, it’s a shame there isn’t a good study of The Adelphi.

RH One gets the feeling with Orwell that’s he’s reacting [from] different parts of his personality and experience; I think he pretty explicitly said this [we] react in different ways.

JN Yes.

RH His ideas of good manners sometimes seem a bit quaint – he’s afraid of seeing the laundress in Paris because he hasn’t got the money to go and have his clothes washed any more.

JN That’s right.

RH Worrying about these things: hating eating a bread roll in the park, something like that.

JN And at the BBC he’ll pour his tea into the saucer in front of all these people who are staring at him. He’s an interesting bloke!

RH Yes.

JN Full stop!  You know. But, no, I see him as someone who is – I would say you’ve got the trajectory of his political life. His political development – is one thing. So that if you were to ask, ‘What did Orwell think about Communism?’ Then what you’ve got to do is say, ‘Well, he thought this at this point and this at that point.’ Because it develops. And the other thing I think is that he is pulled in different directions. There are – I mean the one I’ve identified, I think, is the – that’s of interest to me, is the pull between Partisan Review and the New York [intellectuals] – I suppose what they were at that time, neo-Trotskyists, most of them became neo-conservatives later on, but they were Trotskyists at that time. There’s that pull, at the same time in Britain there’s the pull of Tribune. And you get a tension in his writing that in a lot of ways makes it more interesting.

RH Yeah.

JN That’s the way I see it. There’s this trajectory which you can plot, but you’ve got to be aware that when he said this about the Communists, it’s what he thought then and, but, also you’ve got to be aware there were different pulls on him.

RH Yeah. So how much of an Anarchist or Trotskyist fringe of politics was there in his lifetime in Britain?

JN Well, there wasn’t a lot in Britain. And what there was in Britain was – there was no equivalent to Partisan Review in Britain. The Trotskyist movement such as it was was primarily working class and didn’t produce a cultural or theoretical magazine. You did have C. L. R. James, but of course he buggers off to America himself. So I think from that point of view if there had been a British equivalent of Partisan Review he would have written for it. But there wasn’t. But at the same time it would be completely false to suggest he was any sort of Trotskyist, because he certainly wasn’t, but he was influenced by Trotsky’s ideas – as were a lot of people on the non-Communist left. But I think it’s primarily through this American connection.

It’s very interesting. It’s Partisan Review, it’s the journal that Dwight Macdonald started, Politics, it’s another one, Commentary, which is the least well known, I suppose, which is edited by Norman Podhoretz, which is on the left to begin with. Podhoretz of course becomes one of the staunch neo-cons.

RH I don’t know if he’s still alive.

JN I don’t think he is.

RH Lived until relatively recently.

JN Yeah. I’m sure he’s the one who claimed Orwell would have been a neo-con.

RH That sounds about right.

JN And it excited a lot of controversy. When over here what we tended to get was Christopher Hitchens’ response. But one of the old Partisan Review crowd – New York intellectuals – Alfred Kazin, I think, he provides the most powerful riposte to Podhoretz, myself, he says, ‘that what you’re saying, Norman, is that the man who stood up for the poor, the oppressed, would now be standing up for the rich and the oppressors – [laughter] Like you are!’

Being the best response, myself.

RH Yeah. People like James Burnham and Saul Bellow who started out as Trotskyists ended up as supporters of Ronald Reagan.

JN Course some people go as far as to blame Ronald Reagan on Burnham. That he was the intellectual inspiration for Ronald Reagan, it’s been claimed. 

RH Well, I wonder if Ronald Reagan actually read George Orwell. He might have done.

JN Animal Farm he might. I don’t think he would have got beyond that! [laughter] Mind you he could read a script. He does come across as someone who – you don’t get the impression that he could actually –

RH If he was looking for a leading role in it, perhaps.

JN Yeah. Even then I think he would have got someone to do a synopsis for him.

RH Yes.

JN I don’t know, you don’t get the impression he could actually finish a book. Maybe that is being unfair.

RH He visited Britain in 1948 and said this was one of the formative reasons why he renounced his liberal politics.

JN Really?

RH Yes he came to make a film in Britain – [The Hasty Heart] 

JN As early as ’48?

RH - and appeared on In Town Tonight [on BBC radio]. I think he was quite fêted although he wasn’t a terrific star in America, I guess there weren’t too many [Hollywood] stars came over here – seeing people queuing up, with rationing continuing: a bit jarring having come from Hollywood.

RH So do you think the Trotskyists dreamed of regaining control of the Soviet Union? Is this something that has distorted their views over the decades?

JN Well, when you look at the Trotskyist response – you can see it as a spectrum, I suppose, from Isaac Deutscher, who – is an interesting figure in the sense that first of all that his own work seems to embody more of a ‘great man’ view of history – than anything else – and who certainly I would say saw Stalin as someone who was carrying on the Russian Revolution although perhaps with a bit more brutality than was necessary. I don’t know if I’m being unfair.

RH Yeah.

JN I mean he supported the invasion of Hungary in ’56 – Deutscher –

RH Yeah.

JN For example. So, you’ve got that, you know, almost neo-Stalinist stream of Trotskyism, I would argue, and then you can go over to the orthodox Trotskyists – well, I suppose still related to him, who would argue that Russia was a workers’ state, because of the nationalisation and then you get the American people like Dwight Macdonald and [James] Burnham when he was still one of that crowd and Max Schachtman, who argue that it was a bureaucratic collectivist state, which think is an influence on Orwell – I don’t think it’s the only influence. I think that Franz Borkenau is a big influence as well. He’s a neglected figure – 

And then you can come over to what I would call ‘the IS [International Socialists] tradition’ which is quite possibly in debt to Orwell, but, you know, you will find people in the IS tradition who are quite hostile, for example to Orwell’s attitude toward the working class, they take Wigan Pier as an attack – 

RH Yeah.

JN - on working class people and that sort of thing. So, he excites – even on the section of the Trotskyist left he excites antagonism – 

RH Yeah.

JN - in certain quarters. But it makes it more interesting. I’m sure he would be quite happy with the idea that he excited antagonism in these quarters. But it terms of – I think myself the IS tradition always rejected the Soviet Union per se. A lot of Trotskyists still hoped for – the more orthodox Trotskyists still hoped for the Soviet Union to be saved.

RH Well, it’s rather ironic given where the Russian Communist Party is now a hundred years after the Russian Revolution, it seems to be a right-wing ally to the pro-Kremlin parties and the far right in Russia.

JN Well, in North Korea you’ve got a Communist Party that has embraced absolute monarchy.

RH Yes!

JN It’s astonishing the plasticity of ideas.

RH So one of the things about Orwell, I’m not sure if you’d say – does he specify how a workers’ state would be structured? In Nineteen Eighty-Four you have Winston saying he doesn’t know whether – if the proles gained control the world they would create would be as alien to him and the world of the Party.

JN Yeah.

RH He doesn’t really give any suggestions as to how that would – what sort of institutions that sort of state would function through.

JN Yeah. I think the nearest you get to a picture if you like is Homage to Catalonia.

RH Yes.

JN You know, where he describes the workers being in the saddle. You know, the shops are being taken over, factories are being taken over, the land is being redistributed, this sort of thing and that – to be fair – he’s better at saying what it isn’t than saying what it will be.

RH Yeah.

JN On a number of occasions he says as far as working class people are concerned socialism seems to amount to more pay, better working conditions – and things like that.

RH Yeah.

JN Which he makes clear as far as he is concerned that’s not socialism. But in terms of prescribing it as a political set-up he doesn’t do that. What it is is the abolition of social class and part of the revolution is the upper class is abolished. I think that’s absolutely something he holds to, I think, right to the end. That’s got to happen.

RH Do you think there’s a problem studying a creative writer – who’s obviously creative to a large extent – as a politician? As if you’re looking at somebody who’s in Parliament or -

JN I look at him really as a political thinker and someone pointed out that when Orwell’s politics come out it said exactly what it said on the tin. It didn’t actually discuss his novels as novels which I think is fair enough. As a novelist – I don’t think he’s that good a novelist. What I consider – I’m not a specialist – but I think Burmese Days is pretty good – as a novel – I think Coming Up for Air is pretty good as a novel. I think Nineteen Eighty-Four isn’t a very good novel, but it’s certainly one of the most important novels written over – however you want to say. It’s still a novel that has immense resonance. Even today. I was quite surprised that it survived the fall Communism. Which is something that’s quite interesting in itself.

My reading is that Winston Smith’s helplessness is what people identify with today – it’s a very different world from 1984, there are aspects still, but it’s the helplessness that resonates with people. I think.

The idea that truth doesn’t mean truth, which is, I suppose, the response to Trump today, that truth has become meaningless in the hands of these people. The level of surveillance is another thing that still resonates. Richard Keble’s made the point a couple of times, I think, that even people who reject his vision of a surveillance society quite often start a discussion with Orwell’s vision of a surveillance society then move on to regret it. That’s the sort of starting point.

But as a novelist I think he’s less important than he is as a political thinker. I don’t know if you’d agree but a good case can be made, for example, it’s the fact that Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm are confiscated by the right that actually gave them the impact they had. They escaped that impact eventually – that particular conjunction – in the early Seventies.

But they are turned into international books as a weapon against the Soviet Union in the Cold War.

RH So who would you rate as a novelist? Above Orwell?

JN That’s interesting. What, you mean twentieth century?

RH Yes. On literary [grounds]. Roughly twentieth century.

JN Well, I suppose D. H. Lawrence is a tremendous novelist. James Joyce, tremendous novelist. Someone more recent? I’m trying to think of someone more recent. I’m not sure really. I think Kingsley Amis’s The Anti-Death League which was quite a controversial book, because one of the characters was supposed to be based on Sonia Orwell. I think that’s his best book – which is pretty good. I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t put Orwell in as a great novelist and I think Nineteen Eighty-Four fits in with his idea of a ‘good bad book’.

RH Yes.

JN But certainly it’s one of the most important books. I think Arthur Koestler Darkness at Noon I think is a better novel than either Nineteen Eighty-Four or Animal Farm.

RH I think many of his books have a quality of different things packed in together, like Wigan Pier, obviously the second part – he wanted to spend six months or a year in the North – I think, I suspect he just didn’t have the material to fill a – whether the book would have been better if he’d devoted it entirely to the North.

JN I think he wanted to write a work of propaganda and in retrospect if there’d been more of the diary – 

RH Yes.

JN - showing him going around with people. If he’d have been more transparent about the help he’d received it’d be much harder for people to attack it. You were at the Wigan [inaudible] –

RH That’s right.

JN I was talking to some of the [local] people afterwards and they were quite hostile –

RH Yes.

JN - and to some extent he earned it by not acknowledging the part they played in the production of the book.

RH Yes.

JN You know, I said to them, you’ve got to read the diaries.

RH The people there were political activists, were they?

JN It was an organisation called the Diggers which I presume – well, it’s obviously political, isn’t it? – Diggers. Well, I think they see themselves as a political cultural outfit. The Labour Party was supporting it – and I don’t think it’s a left-wing Labour Party in Wigan. The SWP were supporting it. Who else was supporting it particularly? I can’t remember.

But I thought it was interesting. I got the impression there were more working class people there than you’d expect. I don’t know whether that would happen in Wigan anyway, but – I was warned beforehand that there was going to be a lot of hostility to [Orwell] –

What tickled me was that when I was talking to people afterwards they were all slagging Wigan off themselves, but they just don’t like outsiders doing it! [laughter]

I was told it’s got the highest crime rate, the most poverty, the worst housing and the most CCTV cameras per head of population, the worst city centre for night-time trouble. But I bet if any outsider had said that –

RH Yes.

JN - they’d have turned on them. You know. But I kind of think there’s that element of response.

RH And do you think there is a class divide within socialism? How far is that –

JN I think Orwell is so unfair on the vegetarian –

RH That is the Punch cartoon vision of the left, really.

JN I think it’s a response to Adelphi. You know, this is an attack on Adelphi socialists, because in the North you had a lot of working class involvement with Adelphi – people like Jack Common, you know, were heavily involved. And one of the points Orwell makes when they’re arguing with each other at the Adelphi offices that it’s people arguing that their area is poorer than that area. You know. So that is definitely working class people. You get the impression at the summer schools and things like that; this was where the vegetarians turned up. But it’s so unfair! 

You can’t blame the state of the left on these people. But I think Orwell does come pretty near, that crankishness puts people off socialism.

RH Yes.

JN I just don’t think that’s tenable – as a proposition myself. But I would say the concern in the second half of the book is also – I mean the thing I’m working on at the minute is his attitude towards Fascism – what he argues, when you read the diaries, he goes to a Mosleyite meeting and people are beaten up and he goes to interview them – afterwards. And he writes a letter to The Times complaining about how they were beaten up.

You know, this is him mixing with working class people and taking up their cause after listening to them sympathetically, about the hiding they got off the Blackshirt stewards. And even years later he complains about police complicity with the Blackshirts at that meeting. But then when you read The Road to Wigan Pier it’s all about the danger of the middle class going over to Fascism – people like him – and how that can be avoided. And I think that’s perfectly legitimate, I’m not criticising him for doing that, but what it does, it’s not a book addressing Fascism as it related to the working class. In fact he doesn’t see the Mosleyites as a threat, he sees, as I’m sure you know, a sort of anglicised ‘slimy fascism’ coming in via the Conservative Party.

RH Yeah.

JN And it’s – a work of propaganda targeted at different groups, it doesn’t hang together too well, partly, I think, it’s absolute propaganda in favour of the miners, partly it’s a discussion of housing conditions, aimed at getting sympathy in the South for how bad things are in the North, partly it’s about the state of the left – and one aspect of that is surrendering the middle class, I think he actually refers to clerks, being won over to Fascism, white collar workers being won over by Fascism whereas really their interests lie on the left. I think from that point of view you can see where he’s coming from – but it does lay him open to misinterpretation or criticism from more orthodox Marxists.

RH So you wrote Orwell’s Politics in the late Nineties, in the Blair period.

JN Yeah. I did crack a joke about Orwell’s prescience in changing his name – a bit laboured, I know.

RH What are you working on [now]? You’re doing a book on Orwell and Fascism?

JN It’s – the title is If There Is Hope: Orwell and the Left.

RH Yes.

JN And what the intention is is to look at a number of things, a number of areas in more detail for the first time. So, also I’m going to look at as well is some of the people he interacted with in more detail. So, for example, Ethel Mannin –

RH Yeah.

JN - who I think is a very interesting woman. Her partner Reg Reynolds and her were very close to Orwell for a period. She wrote a book, I think it was published in ’38, on women and revolution. So, I think, given that Orwell was sexist –

RH Yeah.

JN - at that time, I think it’s beginning to break down during the war, myself, his sexism, but I don’t think the young women he was interacting with then would put up with it to the same extent as even very strong, powerful, tough older women had put up with that sort of thing because that was what the world was like; I think in the war that’s beginning to break down, especially Sonia Orwell’s generation won’t put up with that crap. But, you know, you’ve got this very strong woman, Ethel Mannin, writing a book about women and revolution then, so I’m gonna examine her and the relationship that her and Reg had with George and consider why, I suppose, they didn’t have more influence on him in terms of gender politics.

RH Yeah.

JN She was also a pacifist and they fell out – 

RH - about the beginning of the war.

JN - the war. Vera Brittain as well, I’m looking at her pamphlet on bombing – and his response… to the bombing of Germany in the Second World War. Looking – examining the pacifist literature in perhaps a bit more detail than is sometimes done by Orwell scholars. Looking at Orwell’s response.

RH Yeah.

JN So, there are a number of areas I’m gonna explore. I don’t know – you probably know this – but Peace News on occasion was pro-Nazi. There’s no argument about it. Reg Reynolds for example complains about it being pro-Nazi on occasions. And it even carried adverts for these little Fascist groups they were trying to start up around Britain in the war years as if they were legitimate anti-war groups. You know, the British National Party, I think – I’ll have to check that – when it was formed at this time was actually allowed to advertise in Peace News.

RH How would you assess Orwell’s influence in his own time? Have you got the David Astor biography by - ?

JN Not yet.

RH - Jeremy Lewis. Oh, I recommend that. 

JN Yeah, I’ve got it upstairs.

RH I hadn’t realised quite how much Astor saw Orwell as his mentor.

JN Yes.

RH And really that he [Orwell] inspired him [David Astor] to take an interest in anti-colonialism: you have to get on the right side of the African independence movement and directly connected to Astor’s opposition to Suez which was – 

JN Yep.

RH - his most striking moment [as Observer editor] something for which he wasn’t forgiven by some – 

JN ..paper’s sales..

RH Yes. Obviously the equation of Nasser with Hitler. It’s one of those things where it’s almost all in the context, isn’t it?

JN Yeah. I – part of the problem of course is that people invent their own Orwell, don’t they?

RH Yes.

JN You know. And I think we all do that to some extent. But what I like to think is the recognition that – I like to think I’ve got a spatial view, so he’s moving through more than one dimension.

So you’ve got the trajectory, at the same time there’s the recognition of the fact that he’s being pulled in different directions. For instance, he said ‘Abolish the House of Lords!’ Absolutely. No argument. First thing a Labour Government should do – is abolish the House of Lords. First thing a Labour Government should do is abolish the public schools. This is, as far as he’s concerned, I would say, this is a direct political assault on the upper class. Abolish these institutions. 

But, you then find, just when someone like me is thinking, ‘Great! Good old George!’ But, we’ll keep the monarchy! ‘You bastard!’ [chuckles] I think this is on the one hand this makes him more interesting –

RH Yes.

JN - but on the other hand it does show you’ve got to be aware –

RH Yes.

JN - that you’re dealing with a complex figure who’s being pulled, you know, inside his own head in different directions. And if you’re going to be honest to his intellectual biography you’ve always to be aware of that. I would say.

RH Well, [on] the question of would he have backed Bevan or Gaitskell, you have the Keep Left pamphlet in April 1947, Orwell was alive at that time. There were some 15 or 16 [Labour] MPs who signed it – [Richard] Crossman was the editor. He [Orwell] doesn’t include any of them in his list of crypto-Communists.

JN Doesn’t he include Crossman?

RH No… I don’t think so. He mentions him in an article, ‘The Labour Government After Three Years’ – and he says the intellectual left remains unsympathetic to the Labour Government, lists him with [Harold] Lasky and -

JN He blames Crossman for Tribune going downhill, if I remember. Which he – ’cos he sees Crossman as the eminence gris behind Michael Foot. I think that is one of the things he’s got against the Communists. He doesn’t like its Zionism either but it won’t come out against the Communists. I think that might well have kept him away from the Keep Left people.

RH The essence of the pamphlet as I recall is that they believed that if Britain adopted a planned economy we would be secured from currency fluctuations.

JN Yes.

RH I don’t know if that would work if we had a State Planning Commission that would stop runs on the pound. The government would be able to sit there telling everyone – what steel girders they should produce –

JN Yeah. Yeah.

RH - and that – Orwell doesn’t seem to focus on central control of the economy at all – only egalitarian socialism.

JN Well, the thing I still think is not taken enough notice of, when you want to know what he thought of British politics, it’s what he wrote in American journals.

RH Yes.

JN He doesn’t write detailed accounts – he doesn’t lay bare his thinking on British politics so much in British journals. What you get is a lot of anti-Communist stuff; he had a go at the Communists, for instance. And you get, yeah, interesting discussions of small points in Tribune, for example. But if you want to know what he thinks about British politics in detail you’ve got to go over to Partisan Review and you’ve got that ‘Three Years’ appears in Commentary which is edited, I think, at the time by Norman Podhoretz -

RH Yeah

JN - unless I’m mistaken. And does really swing sharply to the right eventually, like Partisan Review itself. One [article] I think [notable] is that ‘Towards European Unity’ which is part of, in American terms a prestigious series, where he’s included with what they regarded as a number of big-hitters, admittedly on a very small field, you know, Victor Serge, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. – I can’t remember the others.

There he says the only thing worth fighting for is a United Socialist States of Europe – and I can’t help feeling he’d have seen a state-controlled British economy as looking dangerously towards a bureaucratic collectivist future or an oligarchical collectivist future – myself. But, it’s not the workers in the saddle. It’s the bureaucrats in the saddle.

RH Yes.

JN But, like I say, there’s different pulls, because he does call for the expropriation of the banks, the railways, the mines, one thing that is neglected is that he would have wiped out the landowning class – his proposal in The Lion and the Unicorn is for absolute levelling down – 

RH Yes.

JN - of what’s allowed as land-ownership. So, the Duke of Westminster and all these people – would’ve had to get jobs! Which is something I’m all in favour of –

RH Yes.

JN - that – one thing I think he always believed that any serious attempt at change would meet with armed resistance. But what he also believed was that in a country like Britain it would be minimal. I think he’s right about the first bit, I’m not so sure he’s right about the second bit.

Whenever I look at Orwell now I always try to find – ‘well I agree with that – now what wouldn’t I have agreed with?’ Because there’s bound to be stuff there that there is a tendency to gloss over. You know, I always try to find the things that he says that jar as well as the things that he says that [you agree with].

RH Yes. You can always see your own reflection when you’re looking at a subject -

JN Absolutely.

RH - and you have to recognise that point where – 

JN You’re looking at yourself rather –

RH Yes!

JN - than the subject.

RH And he’s often his own best critic. That’s one of the things about him. I mean his assessment of what writings he wanted kept and what he wanted forgotten – and also his assessment [that] he ‘ballsed up’ Nineteen Eighty-Four. I asked Richard Blair what he meant by that but nobody seems to have a specific idea of what he hoped the book would say that it missed.

And I also think that the idea that he was suffering from – that it was his ill-health that sort of dragged the book down. He also commented on this himself, but I don’t think that’s –

JN No.

RH No, that’s not really credible.

JN No.

RH I think the first draft was finished around the end of 1947.

JN No, I agree with you. There is – I agree with that entirely – in that ‘Towards European Unity’ he says that we can’t assume that America will never have a socialist movement and he actually says that by 1960 there will be huge numbers of young Russians that won’t put up with a dictatorship. So, this is very different from 1984.

RH And I think that’s deliberate, in a sense he’s putting his assessment [in print] knowing that [people will come looking for what he thought at the time he was writing the novel.

JN Yes.

RH That he didn’t really see it as a projection into the future, he’s kind of saying, ‘Well, if you believe revolution is possible you’ve got decide which way it’s going to go.’

JN Absolutely. Yeah. Or in terms, not just revolution, but the way society could go any way. I think Nineteen Eighty-Four – I’ll have to give this some thought – is [the regime] in 1984 a product of revolution? Or is it possible for it to come about without revolution as a process of non-revolutionary development?

JN It was satire, but satire based on the way the Soviet Union actually ran.

RH So, Orwell’s Politics has been translated into French, Portuguese and Swedish?

JN Yes.

RH And did you get a good response to those?

JN Erm – no.

RH You haven’t been touring..

JN Oh, no. No. No response at all really.

RH So you don’t think he’s as potent a figure on the Continent as here?

JN Well, I suspect he might be, but I also suspect that there are people there who would talk about – I mean I’ve spoken in France on a number of occasions, but never about George Orwell. I did speak – there was the Collège de France? They did invite me to talk on Orwell. That was the only occasion.

RH Was that with Chomsky?

JN That’s it. That’s the only occasion I’ve spoken in France on Orwell. One thing that tickled me is that the French translation [of Orwell’s Politics] is three times as long as the original book.

John Newsinger interviewed in Portslade on 10 April 2017. He is the author of many books including Orwell’s Politics and The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire.

© Roger Howe 2017