The Smelly Little Orthodoxies

TIME was when a scandal involving an important British writer would have reverberated very loudly in American literary circles. Yet so great a cultural gap has opened up between London and New York that hardly a word has reached us here of a great controversy concerning George Orwell which erupted over there a few months ago.

What triggered the explosion was the discovery that back in 1949, shortly before he died, Orwell (in the words of the Guardian, the paper that broke the story) “offered to provide a secret Foreign Office propaganda unit linked to the intelligence services with names of writers and journalists he regarded as ‘crypto-Communist’ and ‘fellow-travelers’ who could not be trusted.”

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Norman Podhoretz

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TIME was when a scandal involving an important British writer would have reverberated very loudly in American literary circles. Yet so great a cultural gap has opened up between London and New York that hardly a word has reached us here of a great controversy concerning George Orwell which erupted over there a few months ago.

What triggered the explosion was the discovery that back in 1949, shortly before he died, Orwell (in the words of the Guardian, the paper that broke the story) “offered to provide a secret Foreign Office propaganda unit linked to the intelligence services with names of writers and journalists he regarded as ‘crypto-Communist’ and ‘fellow-travelers’ who could not be trusted.”