Read And Yet... for Free Online Page A

plea-bargaining, or otherwise of gaining advantage, for himself. By no imaginable stretch could Orwell’s views of Congressman Claude Pepper, or of Vice President Wallace, fall into this category. Nor could it (or did it) damage their careers. And there is no entry on “the list” that comes anywhere near, for sheer sulfuric contempt, Orwell’s published challenge to Professor J. D. Bernal, and the other editors of the Modern Quarterly , to come clean about whether they were conscious agents of Stalin or not.
    This was the period during which Orwell’s samizdat editions of Animal Farm were being confiscated in Germany by American officers and either burned on the spot or turned over to the Red Army. It was indeed difficult for him to oppose Stalinism and Western imperialism at the same time, while attempting to hold on to his independence. But the stupidity of the state only helped to make certain that, at any rate while he lived, he was always its victim and never its servant. The British Foreign Office, which had been erring on Stalin’s side for almost a decade, suddenly needed anti-Stalinist energy in the mid-1940s. It had nowhere to turn, in its search for credible and honest writers, but to the Tribune left. This is not, to take the medium or the long view of history, the most disgraceful moment in the record of British socialism. It is also part of the reason why there was no McCarthyite panic or purge in Britain. The trahison des clercs was steadily opposed, in both its Stalinoid and its conservative forms, by groups like the Freedom Defense Committee. Orwell cannot posthumously be denied his credit for keeping that libertarian and honest tradition alive.
    ( The New York Review of Books , September 26, 2002)
----
    I . Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 1998.
    II . Later information tells us that Henryk Erlich hanged himself in prison in May 1942 while Victor Alter was shot in February 1943. In announcing the deaths, which took place in Moscow, Molotov had not troubled to make this distinction. See Gennadi Kostyrchenko, Out of the Red Shadows (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1995).
    III . Professor Peter Davison, the only scholar with comprehensive access to the archives, points out that the original Rees-Orwell notebook (which included names such as that of Orwell’s tax inspector) is not the same as “the list.” For example, the names of Charlie Chaplin and Stephen Spender are not on the list as it was received by the IRD, and Orwell himself crossed out the names of J. B. Priestley and Tom Driberg. Paul Robeson—correctly listed as a Stalinist in the notebook—was also spared the ordeal of being identified to the IRD. Hardly surprising, since this body was asking only for sincere socialists who opposed the Soviet design.

Orhan Pamuk: Mind the Gap

    Review of Snow by Orhan Pamuk
    W ELL BEFORE THE fall of 2001 a search was in progress, on the part of Western readers and critics, for a novelist in the Muslim world who could act the part of dragoman, an interpretive guide to the East. In part this was and remains a quest for reassurance. The hope was (and is) that an apparently “answering” voice, attuned to irony and rationality and to the quotidian rather than the supernatural, would pick up the signals sent by self-critical Americans and Europeans and remit them in an intelligible form. Hence the popularity of the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, who seemed in his Cairo café-society mode to be potentially “one of us”—even more so when he had the misfortune to be stabbed in the neck by a demented fundamentalist. There was a much lesser vogue for spikier secular writers, such as the late Abdelrahman Munif, author of the Cities of Salt quintet, and the late Israeli Arab Emile Habibi, whose novel Saeed the Pessoptimist is the favorite narrative of many Palestinians (and who also had the grace to win Israel’s national prize for the best writing in