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of Kingsley Martin as “Decayed liberal. Very dishonest”? Or, to take another and later editor of the New Statesman , to the shrewd characterization of Richard Crossman as “??Political Climber. Zionist (appears sincere about this). Too dishonest to be outright F.T. [fellow traveler]”? The latter has a nice paradox to it; Orwell had a respect for honest Leninists. Almost one-third of the entries end in the verdict “Probably not” or “Sympathizer only,” in the space reserved for Party allegiance. J. B. Priestley is recorded as making huge sums from advantageously published Soviet editions of his works; well, so he did, as it now turns out.
    Some critics, notably Frances Stonor Saunders in her book Who Paid the Piper? , have allowed a delicate wrinkling of the nostril at Orwell’s inclusion of details about race, and what is now termed “sexual preference.” It is true that Isaac Deutscher is listed as a “Polish Jew,” and it is also true that he was a Polish Jew. But then Louis Adamic is identified—and why not?—as “Born in Slovenia not Croatia.” The protean Konni Zilliacus, then a very influential figure, is queried rather than identified as “Finnish? ‘Jewish’?” (He was both.)
    I have to admit that I laughed out loud at seeing Stephen Spender described as having a “Tendency towards homosexuality,” which would not exactly define him, and at seeing Tom Driberg written down as merely “Homosexual,” which was not to say the half of it. Ms. Saunders comments haughtily that accusations of that kind could get a chapinto trouble in those days. Well, not in the British Secret Service or Foreign Office, they couldn’t.
    Hugh MacDiarmid, the Stalin-worshiping Scots poet, was described by Orwell as “Very anti-English.” My friend Perry Anderson, editor of the New Left Review , made something of this, too, until I pointed out that MacDiarmid had listed “Anglophobia” as one of his recreations in Who’s Who. And it was Perry Anderson who published, in his “Components of the National Culture” in the New Left Review in 1968, a chart giving the ethnic and national origins of the Cold War émigré intellectuals in Britain, from Lewis Namier, Isaiah Berlin, E. H. Gombrich, and Bronisław Malinowski to Karl Popper, Melanie Klein, and indeed Isaac Deutscher. He reprinted the diagram in his book English Questions in 1992. I defended him both times. These things are worth knowing.
    There are some crankish bits in the list, as when Paul Robeson is written off as “Very anti-white.” But even some of the more tentative judgments about Americans are otherwise quite perceptive. Henry Wallace, as editor of the New Republic , had already caused Orwell to cease sending contributions to a magazine in which he could sense a general softness on Stalin. In 1948, Wallace’s campaign for the American presidency probably ruined and compromised the American left for a generation, because of his reliance on Communist Party endorsement and organization. Veteran leftist critics of the Truman administration, notably I. F. Stone, were mentally and morally tough enough to point this out at the time.
    All too much has been made of this relatively trivial episode, the last chance for Orwell’s enemies to vilify him for being correct. The points to keep one’s eye on are these: the IRD was not interested or involved in domestic surveillance, and wanted only to recruit staunch socialists and Social Democrats; nobody suffered or could have suffered from Orwell’s private opinion; he said nothing in “private” that he did not consistently say in public. And, while a few on “the list” were known personally to Orwell, most were not. This has its importance, since a “snitch” or stool pigeon is rightly defined as someone who betraysfriends or colleagues in the hope of