The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell

Volume II: My Country Right or Left 1940-1943

by George Orwell
Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus
a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF
Back Cover:
"He was a man, like Lawrence, whose personality shines out in everything he said or
wrote." -- Cyril Connolly
George Orwell requested in his will that no biography of him should be written.
This collection of essays, reviews, articles, and letters which he wrote between the ages
of seventeen and forty-six (when he died) is arranged in chronological order. The four
volumes provide at once a wonderfully intimate impression of, and a "splendid
monument" to, one of the most honest and individual writers of this century -- a man who
forged a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud, who possessed an
unerring gift for going straight to the point, and who elevated political writing to an art.
The second volume principally covers the two years when George Orwell worked
as a Talks Assistant (and later Producer) in the Indian section of the B.B.C. At the same
time he was writing for Horizon, New Statesman and other periodicals. His war-time
diaries are included here.

Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia
First published in England by Seeker & Warburg 1968
Published in Penguin Books 1970
Reprinted 1971
Copyright Sonia Brownell Orwell, 1968
Made and printed in Great Britain by
Hazell Watson & Viney Ltd, Aylesbury, Bucks
Set in Linotype Times
This book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise,
be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of
binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed
on the subsequent purchaser

Contents
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Editing
1940
1. New Words
2. Review of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
3. Notes on the Way
4. Letter to Rayner Heppenstall
5. Review of Personal Record by Julian Green
6. Letter to Rayner Heppenstall
7. [Autobiographical Note]
8. Review of The Totalitarian Enemy by Franz Borkenau
9. Letter to the Editor of Time and Tide
10. Letter to John Lehmann
11. Prophecies of Fascism
12. Letter to James Laughlin
13. Charles Reade
14. The Proletarian Writer
15. Review of Landfall by Nevil Shute, etc.
1941
16. London Letter to Partisan Review
17. The Lion and the Unicorn
18. Letter to the Reverend Iorwerth Jones
19. London Letter to Partisan Review
20. The Frontiers of Art and Propaganda
21. Tolstoy and Shakespeare
22. The Meaning of a Poem
23. Literature and Totalitarianism
24. Letter to Dorothy Plowman
25. Wells, Hitler and the World State
26. London Letter to Partisan Review
27. The Art of Donald McGill
28. No, Not One
1942
29. London Letter to Partisan Review
30. Rudyard Kipling
31. The Rediscovery of Europe
32. The British Crisis: London Letter to Partisan Review
33. Review of The Sword and the Sickle by Mulk Raj Anand
34. Pacifism and the War
35. London Letter to Partisan Review
36. Review of Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages by T. S. Eliot
37. An Unpublished Letter to the Editor of The Times
38. B.B.C. Internal Memorandum
39. Letter to T. S. Eliot
40. Review of The British Way in Warfare by B. H. Liddell Hart
41. Looking Back on the Spanish War
42. Letter to George Woodcock
1943

43. W.B.Yeats
44. Letter from England to Partisan Review
45. Pamphlet Literature
46. London Letter to Partisan Review
47. Literature and the Left
48. Letter to an American Visitor by Obadiah Hornbooke and As One Non-Combatant to Another
49. Letter to Alex Comfort
50. Letter to Rayner Heppenstall
51. Review of Beggar My Neighbour by Lionel Fielden
52. Letter to L. F. Rushbrook-Williams
53. Letter to Philip Rahv
54. Who Are the War Criminals?
55. Mark Twain -- The Licensed Jester
56. Poetry and the Microphone
War-time Diaries
57. War-time Diary: 28 May 1940-28 August 1941
58. War-time Diary: 14 March 1942-15 November 1942
Appendix I: Books by or containing contributions by George Orwell
Appendix II: Chronology

Acknowledgements
The editors wish to express their grateful thanks to the following institutions and libraries, their
trustees, curators and staffs for their co-operation and valuable help and for making copies of Orwell
material available: Sir Frank Francis, Director and Principal Librarian of the British Museum (for: II: 37;
III: 105; IV: 8); Dr John D. Gordan, Curator of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of the New
York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (for: 1:18, 22, 23, 31, 33, 36, 38, 48, 50-52, 54,
58, 60, 61, 73, 75, 76, 86, 92, 98, 108, 112, 116, 121, 124, 128, 133, 139, 140, 141, 146, 154; III: 53, 97,
106; IV: 29, 59, 92, 95, 100, 106, 107, 110, 115, 121, 126, 136, 137, 142, 144, 159, 164, 165); Dr Warren
Roberts, Director of the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas (for: I: 65, 66, 79, 102, 122, 123,
161; II: 4, 6, 10, 50; III: 52); S. C. Sutton, Librarian and Keeper of India Office Records (for: I: 115);
Robert L. Collison, Librarian of the B.B.C. Library (for: II: 38, 39, 52); Dr G. Chandler, Librarian of
Liverpool City Library (for: 1: 94); Wilbur Smith, Head of the Department of Special Collections, Library
of the University of California, Los Angeles (for: I: 84); Anne Abley, Librarian of St Anthony's College,
Oxford (for: IV: 31, 32); and J. W. Scott, Librarian of University College, London, for the material in the
George Orwell Archive.
We are also deeply indebted to all those recipients of letters from Orwell, or their executors, who
have been kind enough to make available the correspondence published in these volumes.
We would like to thank the following publications for permission to reproduce material first
published in their pages: Commentary; Encounter; the Evening Standard; Forward; Life; the Listener; the
London Magazine; the Manchester Evening News; the New Leader (N.Y.); the New Statesman and Nation;
the New Yorker; the New York Times Book Review; the Observer; Partisan Review; Peace News; the
Socialist Leader; Time and Tide; The Times; Tribune; Wiadomosci.
We would like to thank the following for allowing us to use material whose copyright they own:
the executors of the late Frank Richards for his 'Reply to George Orwell' in Horizon; H. W. Wilson & Co.
for Orwell's entry in Twentieth Century Authors; George Allen & Unwin Ltd for "The Rediscovery of
Europe" from Talking to India; Professor George Woodcock and D. S. Savage for their contributions to the

controversy "Pacifism and the War" in Partisan Review; Dr Alex Comfort for his contribution to the same
controversy and for his "Letter to an American Visitor" in Tribune; William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd for
The English People; the executors of the late James Agate for his contribution to the controversy in the
Manchester Evening News; the executors of Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Oxford University Press for
"Felix Randal"; Elek Books Ltd for the Introduction to Jack London's Love of Life; Eyre & Spottiswoode
Ltd for the Introduction to Leonard Merrick's The Position of Peggy Harper and the executors of the late
Konni Zilliacus for his letters to Tribune.
We would like to thank the following for their co-operation and invaluable help; Mrs Evelyn
Anderson, the Hon. David Astor, Frank D. Barber, Dennis Ceilings, Dr Alex Comfort, Jack Common,
Lettice Cooper, Stafford Cottman, Humphrey Dakin, Mrs John Deiner, Mrs William Dunn, Mrs T. S. Eliot,
Dr McDonald Emslie, Faber and Faber Ltd, Mr and Mrs Francis Fierz, Roy Fuller, T. R. Fyvel, Livia
Gollancz, Victor Gollancz Ltd, Mrs Arthur Goodman, A. S. F. Gow, James Hanley, Rayner Heppenstall,
Inez Holden, Mrs Humphrey House, Mrs Lydia Jackson, Frank Jellinek, Dr Shirley E. Jones, Jon Kimche,
Denys King-Farlow, Arthur Koestler, Mrs Georges Kopp, James Laughlin, F. A. Lea, John Lehmann, John
McNair, Michael Meyer, Henry Miller, Raymond Mortimer, Mrs Middleton Murry, Mrs Rosalind
Obermeyer, Laurence O'Shaughnessy, Partisan Review, Professor R. S. Peters, Ruth Fitter, Joyce Pritchard,
Philip Rahv, Sir Herbert Read, Vernon Richards, the Rev. Herbert Rogers, the Hon. Sir Steven Runciman,
Brenda Salkeld, John Sceats, Roger Senhouse, Stephen Spender, Oliver Stallybrass, Professor Gleb Struve,
Julian Symons, F. J. Warburg and Professor George Woodcock. We would also like to thank: Angus Calder
(for allowing us to consult his unpublished thesis on the Common Wealth Party); Howard Fink (for
allowing us to consult his unpublished Chronology of Orwell's Loci and Activities); and I. R. Wilson
(whose George Orwell: Some Materials for a Bibliography, School of Librarianship, London University,
1953, was indispensable).
Finally, this edition would not have been possible but for the patient and understanding editorial
help of Aubrey Davis and the support and help of the Library staff of University College London,
particularly that of J. W. Scott, the Librarian, Margaret Skerl, Karen Bishop, Mrs Michael Kraushaar and
Mrs Gordon Leitch.

A Note on the Editing

The contents are arranged in order of publication except where the time lag
between writing and appearance in print is unusually large, when we have chosen the
date of writing. There are one or two rare exceptions to this rule, generally made for the
sake of illustrating the development in Orwell's thought, but a note at the end of each
article or review states when, and in which publication, it appeared first. If it was not
published or the date of writing has determined its position, the date of writing is given.
Where there is no mention of a periodical at the end of an article, it has never been
published before. "Why I Write", written in 1946, has been placed at the beginning of
Volume I, as it seems a suitable introduction to the whole collection. Where an article
was reprinted in the major collections of his writing, this has been indicated and the
following abbreviations used for the various books: C.E., Collected Essays; Cr.E.,
Critical Essays; D.D., Dickens, Dali and Others; E.Y.E., England Your England; I .T
.W.,Inside the Whale; O.R.,The Orwell Reader; S.E., Shooting an Elephant; S.J., Such
Were the Joys.
Any title in square brackets at the head of an article or review has been supplied
by us. All the others are either Orwell's own or those of the editors of the publication in
question. He certainly wrote his own titles for his Tribune pieces: some of the others read

as if he had written them but with most it is hard to tell and there is no way of finally
checking.
Only when the article has never been printed before have we had the manuscript
to work from and none of these were revised by Orwell as they would have been had he
published them. With everything else we have had to use the text as it appeared in print.
As anyone who has ever done any journalism or book reviewing knows, this means the
text which appears here may well be slightly, if not very, different from the text Orwell
originally wrote. Editors cut, printers make errors which are not thought of as very
important in journalism, and it is only when the writer wants to reprint his pieces in book
form that he bothers to restore the cuts, correct the errors and generally prepare them to
survive in more lasting form: the reader therefore should bear in mind that they might
well be very different if Orwell had revised them for re-publication. Both to these
previously printed essays and journalism and to the hitherto unpublished articles and
diaries we have given a uniform style in spelling, quotation marks and punctuation.
The letters were written, nearly always in haste, with scant attention to style and
hardly any to punctuation; but throughout them we have corrected spelling mistakes,
regularized the punctuation and have put book and periodical titles in italics. In a few
cases postscripts of an unimportant nature have been omitted without indication.
Otherwise cuts in both the letters and the journalism have been indicated by three dots,
with a fourth dot to indicate a period. The same method was used by Orwell for
indicating omissions when abridging excerpts he was quoting in reviews and essays, but
as we have not made cuts in any of these excerpts there should be no confusion between
our cuts and Orwell's own.
Orwell's "As I Please" column often consisted of two or more sections each
devoted to a specific topic. Whenever one of the self-contained sections has been entirely
omitted, this has not been indicated, but any cut made within a section is indicated by the
usual three or four dots.
George Orwell never legally changed his name from Eric Blair and all the friends
he made when young knew him and addressed him as Eric Blair. Later on new friends
and acquaintances knew him and addressed him as George Orwell. In his letters he signs
himself by the name his correspondent used. His earlier articles were signed E. A. Blair
or Eric Blair and we have indicated these. From the moment this name is dropped in his
published writing it is entirely signed George Orwell. Where a footnote deals with a
period or a situation in which he would have looked upon himself primarily as Eric Blair
we have referred to him by this name.
As this is an Anglo-American edition, many of the footnotes have been provided
for the benefit of American readers and contain information we know to be familiar to
English readers. We have put in the minimum of footnotes. This is largely because of the
great difficulty of annotating the history of the period during which he wrote. It is still too
recent for standard histories of it to exist and the events and people he discussed are often
still the subjects of fierce polemic making it difficult to give an "objective" footnote. We
have only footnoted the text in some detail where he talks about people or events in his
personal life or where there is a reference to some topic about which the reader could find
nothing in any existing book of reference. The numbers in the cross-references in the
footnotes refer to items, not pages.

Yours
Eric Blair

25. Wells, Hitler and the World State

In March or April, say the wiseacres, there is to be a stupendous knockout blow at Britain.
. . . What Hitler has to do it with, I cannot imagine. His ebbing and dispersed military resources
are now probably not so very much greater than the Italians' before they were put to the test in
Greece and Africa.
The German air power has been largely spent. It is behind the times and its first-rate men
are mostly dead or disheartened or worn out.
In 1914 the Hohenzollern army was the best in the world. Behind that screaming little
defective in Berlin there is nothing of the sort. . . .Yet our military "experts" discuss the waiting
phantom. In their imaginations it is perfect in its equipment and invincible in discipline. Sometimes
it is to strike a decisive "blow" through Spain and North Africa and on, or march through the
Balkans, march from the Danube to Ankara, to Persia, to India, or "crush Russia", or "pour" over
the Brenner into Italy. The weeks pass and the phantom does none of these things -- for one
excellent reason. It does not exist to that extent. Most of such inadequate guns and munitions as
it possessed must have been taken away from it and fooled away in Hitler's silly feints to invade
Britain. And its raw jerry-built discipline is wilting under the creeping realization that the Blitzkreig
is spent, and the war is coming home to roost

These quotations are not taken from the Cavalry Quarterly but from a series of
newspaper articles by Mr H. G. Wells, written at the beginning of this year and now
reprinted in a book entitled Guide to the New World. Since they were written, the German
army has overrun the Balkans and reconquered Cyrenaica, it can march through Turkey
or Spain at such time as may suit it, and it has undertaken the invasion of Russia. How
that campaign will turn out I do not know, but it is worth noticing that the German
general staff, whose opinion is probably worth something, would not have begun it if
they had not felt fairly certain of finishing it within three months. So much for the idea
that the German army is a bogey, its equipment inadequate, its morale breaking down,
etc. etc.
What has Wells to set against the "screaming little defective in Berlin"? The usual
rigmarole about a World State, plus the Sankey Declaration, which is an attempted
definition of fundamental human rights, of anti-totalitarian tendency. Except that he is
now especially concerned with federal world control of air power, it is the same gospel as
he has been preaching almost without interruption for the past forty years, always with an
air of angry surprise at the human beings who can fail to grasp anything so obvious.
What is the use of saying that we need federal world control of the air? The whole
question is how we are to get it. What is the use of pointing put that a World State is
desirable? What matters is that not one of the five great military powers would think of

submitting to such a thing. All sensible men for decades past have been substantially in
agreement with what Mr Wells says; but the sensible men have no power and, in too
many cases, no disposition to sacrifice themselves. Hitler is a criminal lunatic, and Hitler
has an army of millions of men, aeroplanes in thousands, tanks in tens of thousands. For
his sake a great nation has been willing to overwork itself for six years and then to fight
for two years more, whereas for the common-sense, essentially hedonistic world-view
which Mr Wells puts forward, hardly a human creature is willing to shed a pint of blood.
Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even of peace, you have got to
eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as
that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to "enlightened" and hedonistic
people. What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some
vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the
ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For
the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break
this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the S.S. men
patrolling the London streets at this moment. Similarly, why are the Russians fighting
like tigers against the German invasion? In part, perhaps, for some half-remembered ideal
of Utopian Socialism, but chiefly in defence of Holy Russia (the "sacred soil of the
Fatherland", etc. etc.), which Stalin has revived in an only slightly altered form. The
energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions -- racial pride, leaderworship, religious belief, love of war -- which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off
as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as
to have lost all power of action.
The people who say that Hitler is Antichrist, or alternatively, the Holy Ghost, are
nearer an understanding of the truth than the intellectuals who for ten dreadful years have
kept it up that he is merely a figure out of comic opera, not worth taking seriously. All
that this idea really reflects is the sheltered conditions of English life. The Left Book
Club was at bottom a product of Scotland Yard, just as the Peace Pledge Union is a
product of the navy. One development of the last ten years has been the appearance of the
"political book", a sort of enlarged pamphlet combining history with political criticism, as
an important literary form. But the best writers in this line -- Trotsky, Rauschning,
Rosenberg, Silone, Borkenau, Koestler and others -- have none of them been Englishmen,
and nearly all of them have been renegades from one or other extremist party, who have
seen totalitarianism at close quarters and known the meaning of exile and persecution.
Only in the English-speaking countries was it fashionable to believe, right up to the
outbreak of war, that Hitler was an unimportant lunatic and the German tanks made of
cardboard. Mr Wells, it will be seen from the quotations I have given above, believes
something of the kind still. I do not suppose that either the bombs or the German
campaign in Greece have altered his opinion. A lifelong habit of thought stands between
him and an understanding of Hitler's power.
Mr Wells, like Dickens, belongs to the non-military middle class. The thunder of
guns, the jingle of spurs, the catch in the throat when the old flag goes by, leave him
manifestly cold. He has an invincible hatred of the fighting, hunting, swashbuckling side
of life, symbolized in all his early books by a violent propaganda against horses. The
principal villain of his Outline of History is the military adventurer, Napoleon. If one
looks through nearly any book that he has written in the last forty years one finds the

same idea constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who
is working towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a
disorderly past. In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up,
always more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism,
aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion,
monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of
victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man. Now, he is probably right in
assuming that a "reasonable", planned form of society, with scientists rather than witchdoctors in control, will prevail sooner or later, but that is a different matter from
assuming that it is just round the corner. There survives somewhere or other an
interesting controversy which took place between Wells and Churchill at the time of the
Russian Revolution. Wells accuses Churchill of not really believing his own propaganda
about the Bolsheviks being monsters dripping with blood etc., but of merely fearing that
they were going to introduce an era of common sense and scientific control, in which
flag-wavers like Churchill himself would have no place. Churchill's estimate of the
Bolsheviks, however, was nearer the mark than Wells's. The early Bolsheviks may have
been angels or demons, according as one chooses to regard them, but any any rate they
were not sensible men. They were not introducing a Wellsian Utopia but a Rule of the
Saints, which, like the English Rule of the Saints, was a military despotism enlivened by
witchcraft trials. The same misconception reappears in an inverted form in Well's attitude
to the Nazis. Hitler is all the war-lords and witch-doctors in history rolled into one.
Therefore, argues Wells, he is an absurdity, a ghost from the past, a creature doomed to
disappear almost immediately. But unfortunately the equation of science with common
sense does not really hold good. The aeroplane, which was looked forward to as a
civilizing influence but in practice has hardly been used except for dropping bombs, is
the symbol of that fact. Modern Germany is far more scientific than England, and far
more barbarous. Much of what Wells has imagined and worked for is physically there in
Nazi Germany. The order, the planning, the State encouragement of science, the steel, the
concrete, the aeroplanes, are all there, but all in the service of ideas appropriate to the
Stone Age. Science is fighting on the side of superstition. But obviously it is impossible
for Wells to accept this. It would contradict the world-view on which his own works are
based. The war-lords and the witch-doctors must fail, the common-sense World State, as
seen by a nineteenth-century liberal whose heart does not leap at the sound of bugles,
must triumph. Treachery and defeatism apart, Hitler cannot be a danger. That he should
finally win would be an impossible reversal of history, like a Jacobite restoration.
But is it not a sort of parricide for a person of my age (thirty-eight) to find fault
with H. G. Wells? Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century
are in some sense Wells's own creation. How much influence any mere writer has, and
especially a "popular" writer whose work takes effect quickly, is questionable, but I
doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the
English language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore
the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells had never existed. Only, just
the singleness of mind, the one-sided imagination that made him seem like an inspired
prophet in the Edwardian age, make him a shallow, inadequate thinker now. When Wells
was young, the antithesis between science and reaction was not false. Society was ruled
by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory businessmen, dull squires,

bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was
faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity,
snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side;
there was need of someone who could state the opposite point of view. Back in the
nineteen-hundreds it was a wonderful experience for a boy to discover H. G. Wells.
There you were, in a world of pedants, clergymen and golfers, with your future
employers exhorting you to "get on or get out", your parents systematically warping your
sexual life, and your dull-witted schoolmasters sniggering over their Latin tags; and here
was this wonderful man who could tell you about the inhabitants of the planets and the
bottom of the sea, and who knew that the future was not going to be what respectable
people imagined. A decade or so before aeroplanes were technically feasible Wells knew
that within a little while men would be able to fly. He knew that because he himself
wanted to be able to fly, and therefore felt sure that research in that direction would
continue. On the other hand, even when I was a little boy, at a time when the Wright
brothers had actually lifted their machine off the ground for fifty-nine seconds, the
generally accepted opinion was that if God had meant us to fly He would have given us
wings. Up to 1914 Wells, was in the main a true prophet. In physical details his vision of
the new world has been fulfilled to a surprising extent.
But because he belonged to the nineteenth century and to a non-military nation
and class, he could not grasp the tremendous strength of the old world which was
symbolized in his mind by fox-hunting Tories. He was, and still is, quite incapable of
understanding that nationalism, religious bigotry and feudal loyalty are far more powerful
forces than what he himself would describe as sanity. Creatures out of the Dark Ages
have come marching into the present, and if they are ghosts they are at any rate ghosts
which need a strong magic to lay them. The people who have shown the best
understanding of Fascism are either those who have suffered under it or those who have a
Fascist streak in themselves. A crude book like The Iron Heel, written nearly thirty years
ago, is a truer prophecy of the future than either Brave New World or The Shape of
Things to Come. If one had to choose among Wells's own contemporaries a writer who
could stand towards him as a corrective, one might choose Kipling, who was not deaf to
the evil voices of power and military "glory". Kipling would have understood the appeal
of Hitler, or for that matter of Stalin, whatever his attitude towards them might be. Wells
is too sane to understand the modern world. The succession of lower-middle-class novels
which are his greatest achievement stopped short at the other war and never really began
again, and since 1920 he has squandered his talents in slaying paper dragons. But how
much it is, after all, to have any talents to squander.
Horizon, August 1941; Cr.E.; D.D.; C.E.

26. London Letter to Partisan Review

London