Red Science

Letters

Vol. 28 No. 7 · 6 April 2006

From Christopher Hitchens

In his discussion of J.D. Bernal (LRB, 9 March) Eric Hobsbawm writes: ‘In 1945-46 the wartime insider once again became the Communist outsider and potential traitor, though the establishment had more trouble in getting used to the transition than George Orwell, who lost no time in denouncing Bernal’s Stalinism and “slovenly style”.’ Since Hobsbawm goes on to say that Bernal ruled himself out of any further connection with ‘the establishment’, it is hard to see how that ‘establishment’ can have had ‘more’ trouble than Orwell did. Hobsbawm must be referring to Orwell’s unsigned editorial on behalf of Polemic, the magazine edited by Humphrey Slater, Bertrand Russell and A.J. Ayer. This publication of the independent left had been attacked in the Communist Modern Quarterly in December 1945, for the interesting offence of ‘trying to break down the difference between right and wrong’. The same issue of the MQ contained an essay by Bernal, replete with Stalinist euphemisms, which illustrated those differences in what might be termed a dogmatic way. Orwell responded to both MQ and Bernal in May 1946, and drew a connection between their politics and the ‘pompous and slovenly’ style with which Bernal in particular gave himself away.

Bernal had been invited to contribute to the first two issues of Polemic and was further invited to respond on this occasion. When invited by Orwell to contribute a talk for the Indian Service of the BBC in 1942, he accepted and then declined. With Polemic, he simply declined. In his own hard-to-read sentence, Hobsbawm conveys the impression that Orwell’s ‘denouncing’ of Bernal came from nowhere, whereas the facts of the case are the opposite, as he must know from having read and quoted the Polemic editorial. It seems we are not quite out of the Stalinist wood, or langue de bois if you prefer.

Christopher Hitchens
Washington DC

Vol. 28 No. 8 · 20 April 2006

From Eric Hobsbawm

The contrast between the official attitude to J.D. Bernal in 1946 and George Orwell’s is not mine, as Christopher Hitchens suggests, but is made in Andrew Brown’s biography (Letters, 6 April). Nor was I challenging Orwell’s judgment about his views and style. There is not a word in my piece which justifies Hitchens’s accusations that it is Stalinist in style or content. I was merely observing the difference in attitude between the top British decision-makers – who, against the advice of the security services and political objections such as Orwell’s, had treated Bernal as a crucial and trusted contributor to the war effort ever since January 1939 – and Orwell’s ‘sharp denunciation’ (Brown) which anticipated the Cold War. But in 1946, Orwell’s attitude, whether right or not, was untypical. Most people would still have agreed with John Anderson’s 1939 minute (‘I don’t think in present circumstances we need object to Professor Bernal’). The Cold War had not yet been declared. Or, one hoped, concluded.

Eric Hobsbawm
London NW3