Peter Stansky. Photo Stanford University.

The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn, New York, news from Spain was everywhere. Like many children of his generation, what Stansky remembers most is the music. His family, he recalls, played Ernst Busch’s Six Songs for Democracy, which were recorded in Barcelona in 1938 as Francoist bombs were falling, and appeared in the US in 1940 as a three-record set of 78s. When Stansky, now 92 and an emeritus professor at Stanford, hears “Die Thälmann-Kolonne” or “Die Moorsoldaten,” he’s transported straight back to his New York childhood.

In his teenage years, Peter became fascinated with the Spanish war, along with English politics and culture. As a senior History major at Yale in 1953, he decided to write his undergraduate thesis on four English writers who were drawn to Spain: John Cornford (Darwin’s great grandson), Julian Bell (Virginia Woolf’s nephew), Stephen Spender, and Eric Blair. The latter, who was better known as George Orwell, had died of tuberculosis in January 1950, just three days after Stansky’s eighteenth birthday.

Orwell’s ghost would accompany Stansky for the rest of his life. In the 1970s, Stansky and William Abrahams co-wrote two groundbreaking studies: The Unknown Orwell, which focused on the writer’s younger years, and Orwell, the Transformation, which argued that Orwell’s time in Spain marked a turning point in his life. In the 1980s, Stansky edited a collection on the novel 1984; his most recent book, from 2023, is The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War.

The first UK edition of Homage to Catalonia.

In the early 1950s, when Stansky was finishing up his degree at Yale, Orwell’s global fame was nowhere near where it is today. Still, his star had been rising fast after the publication of Animal Farm in 1945 and the dystopian novel 1984 four years later. In 1952, Harcourt Brace published the first US edition of Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of his six months in Spain fighting for the Republic, in which he reported in vivid detail on the conflict between the non-Stalinist, revolutionary Left, with which he was be associated, and the Communist-Party-supported Republican government—a conflict that came to a head in the so-called May Days of 1937.

George Orwell around 1940. Colorized by Cassowary. CC BY 2.0.

Homage to Catalonia had not caught much notice when it first came out in 1938, but it became a bestseller 14 years later—not least thanks to its introduction by Lionel Trilling, the country’s best known literary critic, who described the book as “one of the important documents of our time” that in its “moral tone” was “uniquely simple and true”: “in one of its most significant aspects,” he added, it “is about disillusionment with Communism.” Orwell, for Trilling, is not a genius but rather “a virtuous man” who meets the world “with simple, direct, undeceived intelligence” and “tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us.” Unlike most other intellectuals of his generation, Trilling claimed, Orwell thought for himself and “was interested only in telling the truth.”

The posthumous edition of Homage certified Orwell’s status as a quintessential anti-communist. Alongside intellectuals like Arthur Koestler, Louis Fischer, André Gide, and Stephen Spender, who had publicly disavowed their Communist pasts in The God That Failed: A Confession (1949), Orwell—who considered himself a democratic socialist—became a moral icon of the Cold War.

Today, seventy-five years after his death, it is much less clear what exactly Orwell stands for in political, moral, or literary terms. Yet, somehow, he’s read and written about more than ever, while “Orwellian” has become a household adjective. His life and work have inspired hundreds of books, including half a dozen major biographies, and there is no end in sight.

“Orwell’s reputation as a virtuous man is in steep decline,” Stansky told me, with a chuckle, when I spoke with him in November. “But curiously, it doesn’t seem to have affected the interest in him.”

What was it like to write about Orwell in the early 1950s?

It was great fun, in part because so little work on him had been done. I spent a good amount of time in the Yale library tracking down his essays, which were scattered through a great number of periodicals.

Tell me about the political atmosphere at the time.

Political activity on college campuses was very low. You must remember, this was the quiet 1950s, before the turmoil of the ‘60s. It was also the height of McCarthyism, so people were very careful.

In what way?

I’ll give you an example. I had taken an absolutely fabulous course on ancient Greek theater taught by the great classicist Bernard Knox. Now, as it happened, Knox was a British veteran of the International Brigades. In Spain, he had fought alongside the poet John Cornford, who had died early in the war. Knox had even contributed to a memorial book for Cornford that was published in 1938. In my junior year, I wrote a paper on Cornford for a terrific seminar taught by the historian Leonard Krieger. It occurred to me to mention that Yale’s own Professor Knox had fought with Cornford in Spain. Well, Krieger called me to his office and told me I shouldn’t have mentioned Knox. And mind you, this was a seminar paper that no one other than Krieger would read!

But didn’t Knox write openly about his experience in the International Brigades and his work for the American OSS during World War II?

Yes, but that wasn’t until much later. In fact, in the early sixties, when Billy Abrahams and I interviewed Knox for Journey to the Frontier, our book about Cornford and Bell, he still insisted that he be quoted under a pseudonym.

Were you, as a mere undergraduate, treading politically risky terrain? Did you feel pressured to pick a different topic?

No, I didn’t. Ironically, I had a very right-wing advisor for my senior essay, William Emerson, who was very demanding in terms of style, but not in terms of content. One of my two outside readers was Richard Herr, the historian of Spain, who did not much like the chapter in which I sketched the context of the war. I guess he thought it wasn’t deep enough. But then the essay was sent to the historian L.P. Curtis, who had a very favorable reading. I even ended up winning one of the senior essay prizes.

In the years after his death, Sonia Orwell, his widow, was in charge of the estate. How was your relationship with her?

Billy and I were on very good terms with Sonia to begin with, although she didn’t seem all that interested in what we were doing. The Orwell archive at University College, London, had been established, however, and having access to that was very useful because they had a lot of the fugitive stuff—mostly printed matter, not much of the manuscript material yet. The agreement with Sonia was that we were not going to write a biography, in honor of Orwell’s own request to that effect. But we got into a conflict with her because, to her mind, we were doing biographical work. When she insisted on the right to read and control our work, we refused, and she banned us from the archive. At that point, that didn’t make much of a difference because we’d already had access to all the important material. But Sonia was so furious about our book that she commissioned Bernard Crick to do the official biography. Then she got into a fight with him, too, and tried to block publication. But Crick had an ironclad contract, and it came out anyway.

How did you relate to Crick and other Orwell biographers like Jeffrey Meyers?

In 1984, Crick, Meyers, and I were all invited to an Orwell conference at the Library of Congress. The books Billy and I wrote had some errors, which both Crick and Meyers delighted in pointing out. That wasn’t very nice. But they didn’t get along with each other, either. At one point, Crick came up to me and asked: “How about we bury our hatchets… in Jeffrey’s skull?” (Laughs.) There were plenty of fights like that. In the 1980s, when Norman Podhoretz tried to appropriate what he saw as the right-wing Orwell, Christopher Hitchens fought with him about that. But by the time Orwell’s centenary came around, in 2003, Hitchens had moved to the right, and he was appropriating the right-wing Orwell, while Louis Menand and Stefan Collini defended the left-wing Orwell.

It makes one wonder what it is about Orwell that has people so eager to recruit him posthumously to their cause. What makes his cultural capital so valuable?

Two things. First, what Billy and I tried to emphasize in our work was that Orwell was a great writer. An artist. Obviously, the politics are tremendously important. But it seems to me that his greatest achievement is his great skill as a writer—an aspect that is often ignored. If you can call him a political thinker, it’s because he writes well about important things. Secondly, his evolution to socialism was gradual. That, too, is often forgotten. It’s exaggerated, for example, to claim that he came back from Burma a convinced anti-imperialist. He had doubts about imperialism, to be sure. But his leftward evolution was quite gradual. He famously wrote in “Why I Write” that being in Spain made him a socialist. But if you look at the actual quote, there are two important qualifiers. “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936,” he says, “has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” So it’s democratic socialism, as he understands it. My point is not only that Orwell is a very nuanced thinker, but also that he changed his mind. One thing that people find odd, and hard to accept, is that he came back from Spain a pacifist. During the two years from his return from Spain to the Nazi-Soviet pact, he felt the world war everyone knew was coming would be an imperialist war. He didn’t want Britain to go to war. Nor was he as anti-German as others were. In a 1940 review of Mein Kampf, he writes about Hitler: “Ever since he came to power … I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity” and that he has “never been able to dislike him.”

That’s certainly an honest confession. Is Trilling right to connect the quality of Orwell’s writing to his honesty?

No, I don’t think so. When Orwell comes back from Burma, he realizes that he wants to be a writer. But he sees that vocation primarily as a craft. He wants to be a skillful writer of novels and reportage. If he condemns himself to the life in poverty that allows him to write Down and Out in Paris and London, it’s only partially because he feels guilty about being an imperialist. The truth is that he went in search of material to write about. That was the driving force. In fact, the same was true for his trip to Spain. He did not go to Spain to fight; he went to write. It’s only when he arrives in Barcelona that he decides to join a militia. But that wasn’t his original intention.

And then the militia that he does join is affiliated with the POUM…

Right. And that is another piece of evidence in favor of the idea that he was more of a writer than a political thinker. He was politically naïve. As he explored ways to get to Spain, he first went to the communists. He tried to get Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the Communist Party, to help him. Pollitt said he didn’t trust him, and probably with good reason. Only then does Orwell go to the Independent Labour Party, which turned out to be affiliated with the POUM. But all that was quite coincidental. I don’t think, for example, that Orwell knew the ILP was semi-Trotskyist. For our book, Billy and I interviewed John McNair, who was the ILP representative in Barcelona at the time. He told us that his first thought was: “Who needs this reporter?” It was only when he discovered that Eric Blair was in fact George Orwell, whose work he admired, that he changed his mind.

George Orwell as International Brigader in Spain, with the POUM militia at the Aragón front. Orwell is the tallest among the standing figures

In the meantime, Orwell’s work is in the public domain, and the flood of editions and books on him shows no sign of abating. If by now he’s the embodiment of the canon, you and Abrahams helped make that happen.

That’s kind of you to say. I guess it’s relative. A friend of mine, the filmmaker Christopher Angel, has been trying to make a movie or a TV series about Orwell for years, and optioned my Orwell work. You’d think people would like the idea, but, surprisingly, he hasn’t been able yet to get any funding.

Sebastiaan Faber teaches at Oberlin College.