Volume 31, Number 10 · June 14, 1984
'Not One of Us'
By Alfred Kazin
'Not one of us,' said the Labour party secretary in Limehouse. I was a reporter in wartime England interviewing him on Labour's plans for the postwar society, and had asked him what he thought of George Orwell, a name then better known to Americans on the anti-Stalinist left than to most English and American readers before Animal Farm and 1984 made him world-famous. Orwell had been writing the 'London Letter' for Partisan Review, and he had written in Homage to Catalonia (1938) what I fondly thought of as our version of the Spanish Civil War: homage indeed to the Spanish anarchists and to the proscribed POUM, in which Orwell had served, with other unaffiliated British radicals sympathetic to the Independent Labour party; unyielding bitterness about the Stalinist apparatus in Spain that had helped give victory to Franco by its frustration of the spontaneous Spanish revolution and by its attempt to kill opposition on the left.
Feature, 4747 words
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