WAR AND PACIFISM
421
what happened this ye?r in Burma. (b) Of course I have written for the
Adelphi.
Why not? I once wrote an article for a vegetarian paper. Does
that make me a vegetarian? I was associated with the Trotskyists in Spain.
It was chance that I was serving in the POUM militia and not another, and
I largely disagreed with the POUM "line" and told its leaders so freely,
but when they were afterwards accused of pro-Fascist activities I defended
them as best I could. How does this contradict my present anti-Hitler
attitude? It is news to me that Trotskyists are either pacifists or pro–
Fascists. {c) Does Mr. Woodcock really know what kind of stuff I put out
in the Indian broadcasts? He does not-though I would be quite glad to
tell him about it. He is careful not to mention what other people are asso–
ciated with these Indian broadcasts. One for instance is Herbert Read,
whom he mentions with approval. Others are T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster,
Reginald Reynolds, Stephen Spender,
J.
B.S. Haldane, Tom Wintringham.
Most of our broadcasters are Indian leftwing intellectuals, from Liberals
to Trotskyists, some of them bitterly anti-British. They don't do it to
"f~x
the Indian masses" but because they know what a Fascist victory would
mean to the chances of India's independence. Why not try to find out what
I am doing before accusing my good faith?
"Mr. Orwell
is
intellectual-hunting agcdn"
{Mr. Comfort). I have
never attacked "the intellectuals" or "the intelligentsia" en bloc. I have
used a lot of ink and done myself a lot of harm by attacking the successive
literary cliques which have infested this country, not because they were
intellectuals but precisely because they were
not
what I mean by true
intellectuals. The life of a clique is about five years and I have been
writing long enough to see three of them come and two go-the Catholic
gang, the Stalinist gang, and the present Pacifist or, as they are sometimes
nicknamed, Fascifist gang. My case against all of them is that they write
mentally dishonest propaganda and degrade literary criticism to mutual
arse-licking. But even within these various schools I would differentiate
between individuals. I would never think of coupling Christopher Dawson
with Arnold Lunn, or Malraux with Palme Dutt, or Max Plowman with
the Duke of Bedford. And even the work of one individual can exist at
very different levels. For instance Mr. Comfort himself wrote one poem I
value greatly {"The Atoll in the Mind"), and
I
wish he would write more
of them instead of lifeless propaganda tracts dressed up as novels. But
this letter he has chosen to send you is a different matter. Instead of
answering what I have said he tries to prejudice an audience to whom I
am little known by a misrepresentation of my general line and sneers
about my "status" in England. (A writer isn't judged by his "status," he
is judged by his work.) That is on a par with "peace" propaganda which
has to avoid mention of Hitler's invasion of Russia, and it is not what I
mean by intellectual honesty.
It
is just because I do take the function of
the intelligentsia seriously that I don't like the sneers, libels, parrot
phrases and financially profitable back-scratching which flourish in our
En~J;lish
literary world, and perhaps in yours also.
July 12, 1942
LONDON, ENGLAND
