Watching Orwell
It should surprise no one that England’s Special Branch — the police intelligence unit — was watching George Orwell during most of his adult life. It is certainly what Orwell, a student of political paranoia, would have expected.
The file on Orwell, released earlier this week by Britain’s National Archives, is also a testament both to the British sense of convention and a tolerance for eccentricity. According to one sergeant, Orwell’s habit of dressing “in Bohemian fashion,” revealed that the writer was a Communist, a conclusion that will seem strange to anyone who has read “Animal Farm.” Orwell’s file seems to have been rather gently vetted by Britain’s spy agency, MI5, which perhaps understood that a casual dresser is not inevitably an enemy of the state.
This is such an old and forbidding dance, the one between the watchers and the watched. The political life of the past century has been punctuated by one revelation after another, as secret files have been made public, either by legislative fiat or by the accidents of history. The files are nearly always perspicacious — not about the subjects being watched but about the fears of the watchers. This is something Orwell understood perfectly well, how fear enhances perception, but also corrupts it.
There is an obvious irony in Orwell’s being spied on in a way that can only be called Orwellian. That is nearly a universal adjective in these Orwellian days. It’s tempting to say there’s something almost nostalgic about seeing Orwell’s file — a reminder of a less electronic time. Except, of course, that there was nothing nostalgic about the politics of his era. Every age, his as well as ours, seems to live up to its sinister potential.
More later.*
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