Orwell: the lost writings.

WHEN I wished to study the Orwell papers at the British Broadcasting Company archives in Reading, England, I was given a radically incomplete file. The amateur scholar William J. West, searching for material on C. K. Ogden's Basic English, had accidentally found that radio talks by Orwell--a producer in the Indian section from August 1941 until November 1943--had been mysteriously placed 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 in a later volume), of 16 political and literary talks and adaptations, and of one hundred pages of letters from Orwell to his contributors. 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 Burman, 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 war-propaganda, 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 muck-up 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 troden on by a very dirty boot"--a brutal image that recurs in his essay and in 1984. 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 Hilter 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 1984; 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 Passage to India was broadcast to India as German propaganda), they do not deal "with political and literary matters in the highest intellectual context." Rather, as Forster more realistically observed, they are "chatty and scrappy."

The talk on "British Rations and the Submarine War" was spoken by an Indian as if he, rather than Orwell, had written it. Some of the non-discussions are absurd ("ORWELL: The second poem is more like a ballad. EMPSON: Actually it's a savage attack on militaristic sentiment. ORWELL: Possibly, but as I was saying") or unintentionally funny: "It's a pity Wilfred Owen isn't here to read it. He was killed. But we've got Edmund Blunden here today."

What is needed, to place these talks in their proper context, is a discussion of the war in Europe and in South Asia, and a relation of the broadcasts to Orwell's other works. When Orwell was a propagandist, the Nazis were masters of Europe from Norway to the Black Sea. There was a strong possibility that the Japanese might invade India after the fall of Burma in January 1942, or even that the Axis might win the war if Hitler broke through Russia to the Persian Gulf and India joined Japan.

Orwell's talks on Edmund Blunden, Jack London, and Jonathan Swift were early versions of his review of Blunden's Cricket Country (1944), his introduction to London's Love of Life (1945), and his essay on Gulliver's Travels (1946), which meant more to him "than any other book ever written." The third "Voice" talk on poetry reveals that David Copperfield influenced "Such, Such Were the Joys," his essay about "education as an instrument of torture." The first sentence of Orwell's part of a story by five different writers recalls the opening of 1984; the reluctance to kill an enemy reecalls Orwell's own unwillingness, in Spain, to shoot a Fascist who was holding up his trousers and was "visibly a fellow-creature"; and his observation that Blunden's poems express "a love of the surface of the earth" exactly anticipates his famous statement in "Why I Write": "So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth."