Orwell & New Statesman

ORWELL & THE NEW STATESMAN

Orwell despised the editor of the NEW STATESMAN magazine -- Kingsley Martin -- because he refused to publish any of Orwell's 1937 Spanish Civil War articles exposing the role of Stalin's Communists in betraying the Socialist government of the working people. Orwell was fighting -- literally, in the trenches -- on the side of the Socialists and he became a target of Stalin's death squads. Orwell and his wife Eileen were lucky to get out of Spain alive.

Malcolm Muggeridge, a fellow journalist and friend of Orwell, tells the story of the time the two of them were having lunch in a Soho restaurant when Kingsley Martin walked in and sat at a table where Orwell could see him. So Orwell asked Muggeridge to change seats with him "so that he didn't have to look at that corrupt face".

See ORWELL'S PUBS & RESTAURANTS

Kingsley Martin thought Orwell was talking about him when he wrote an As I Please column lambasting Communists in the publishing industry:

"...Don't imagine that for years on end
you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist
of the Soviet regime or any other regime,
and then suddenly return to mental decency.
Once a whore, always a whore..."

But in all fairness Orwell could just as easily have been talking about his publisher Victor Gollanz who had turned down HOMAGE TO CATALONIA and ANIMAL FARM because he considered them too anti-Communist.

In any event, Orwell's dislike of Kingsley Martin didn't prevent him from writing book reviews for the NEW STATESMAN over the years of his journalistic career, which was only interrupted by his writing of books and novels.

I have a book entitled UNWELCOME GUERRILLA which contains all of the book reviews Orwell wrote for the NEW STATESMAN and all of the reviews the NEW STATEMSAN wrote on Orwell's books.

Also in that book is Orwell's obituary written by V.S. Pritchett, a long-time journalist for the New Statesman. It is considered the BEST Orwell obituary and coined many phrases describing Orwell including "wintry conscience of a generation" and "Don Quixote" and conferred on him a kind of sainthood. ~ Jackie Jura

TOUR ORWELL'S SPANISH TRENCHES

SOLDIER ORWELL AT SPANISH FRONT

ORWELL BULLET THRU NECK

ORWELL BIRTHDAY TYPING CATALONIA

ORWELL & NEW STATESMAN MAGAZINE

ORWELL'S CRYSTAL SPIRIT POEM

SPAIN REMEMBERS ORWELL CENTENNIAL

ORWELL DEFINITIVE OBITUARY

AMERICANS' VIETNAM CONFUSION

16.Ministry of Truth and ORWELL'S PUBLISHING PROBLEMS

Jackie Jura
~ an independent researcher monitoring local, national and international events ~

email: orwelltoday@gmail.com
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