The Socialist Patriot by Peter Stansky

Author:Peter Stansky
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

THE COLD WAR

In the sadly brief five years that he had to live, Orwell’s greatest accomplishment and a major cause for his enduring fame was the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four. With his declining health, it was a slow process. Although in London for some months, in the years after the war he spent much of his time in a remote house, Barnhill, on the island of Jura in the Inner Hebrides. He did have quite a few visitors there, but its remoteness was emphasized by the elaborate instructions he sent to them about how to get to him on a two-day trip by train, boat, car, and the last bit generally on foot. As a place to write it was not ideal, and he failed in his attempt to employ even briefly a secretary there. He did love the opportunity to garden, both vegetable and decorative, and to fish. He was also involved in a near fatal accident when he was on a boating excursion with his son and two of the older children of his sister Marjorie, who had recently died. They were caught in the Corryvreckan whirlpool, the third largest in the world. He also spent quite a bit of time in sanatoriums trying to cope with his tuberculosis, first near Edinburgh and later in the Cotswolds before spending his last weeks in University College Hospital in London. Susan Watson came to help him with his son, Richard. His sister Avril was also there to assist, but she and Susan didn’t get on and Susan left. Bill Dunn also came to help with the farm work, and some years later in 1951 he married Avril.

Nineteen Eighty-Four became a Cold War classic, demonstrating the evils of the Soviet system. It was less tightly modeled on the history of Russia since its revolution than Animal Farm, but it clearly derived a significant part of its content from the parallels between Big Brother and Stalin and the control of people’s minds that was part of the Soviet world. This led many to believe, wrongly in my view, that Orwell was anti-socialist. When Animal Farm was so construed in the United States, he had to issue a specific denial affirming his commitment to socialism and his support of the Labour Party.

The final “war” that he would participate in, be influenced by, and made crucial contributions to shaping was the Cold War. Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, whatever else they might be, were undoubtedly documents of the Cold War. It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that Orwell held the perhaps unusual position of being a Cold War socialist. There were of course many anti-Communist socialists, particularly after Hungary and Khrushchev’s speech denouncing Stalin in 1956. But I believe to be a Cold War socialist was comparatively rare, not quite the same thing as being an anti-Communist socialist. It meant he was far more willing than others to support the Cold War and to be active in doing so. Primarily because of that, the ways

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