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.
Orwell died within the year, but the list has stained his
legend. The author of Animal Farm handed over the
names to the beautiful IRD operative Celia Kirwan, one
of three women the widower proposed to in his last
days in the hope of finding a mother for his son.
But yesterday Professor Mackenzie, who knew for
some time he had been fingered, described the list as
"the sort of tittle-tattle you often heard in Red Lion
Square... It's a very shaky list. He was definitely right
about Peter Smollett (aka Smolka, who worked for the
Daily Express) and Commander Edgar Young, both of
whom were nasty shits, but he is wildly off the mark
elsewhere," the historian said.
"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."
While Orwell only queried whether Mackenzie was a
communist, the academic yesterday confirmed that he
had been a party member until he joined Labour in
1943.
The author and former Guardian journalist Ian Aitken,
who worked on Tribune magazine, the home of some of
Orwell's best journalism, said it was "preposterous and
utterly ridiculous to think that Mackenzie was a
danger. My eyebrows went up when I saw Norman's
name and poor Margaret Stewart's. When I knew her
she was very rightwing Labour. I can't think why Orwell
did it. I think his brain must have been addled."
Prof Mackenzie said he suspected that Leonard Woolf,
the husband of the novelist Virginia, may have had
something to do with his appearance on Orwell's list.
"They knew each other and shared similar views. I
know he once described me rather strangely in a letter
as 'the most dangerous man in the New Statesman'."
But fellow historian Timothy Garton Ash, who revealed
the full list, said the point of the exercise was not so
much the people Orwell suspected of being spooks,
but those who should not be used as propa gandists
for the west. "I think probably nothing much happened
to the people he listed. What people forget is that
Orwell was not yet the Orwell we think of. He was seen
as a bit of an eccentric."
Professor Peter Davison, editor of Orwell's Complete
Works, said the really disappointed people will be
those who claimed to have been on the list but were
not.