Why did George Orwell put John Steinbeck’s name on the list of “crypto-communists” he kept in his  notebook while writing 1984, his Cold War classic about totalitarian England under a Stalinesque Big Brother? As the troubled alliance between the USSR and the Free World collapsed following World War II, confirming Orwell’s deepest doubts and deadliest anxieties about Stalinist dictatorship, Steinbeck was living alone in California, dealing with personal depression, divorce,  and the death of Ed Ricketts, while Orwell worked frantically to finish 1984  on a remote island in Scotland, filling his notebook with the names of public figures he considered potential collaborators in the Stalinist invasion he feared. Why was the author of The Grapes of Wrath, Bombs Away, and The Moon Is Down among those suspected by Orwell of being fifth-columnists for the communist cause in England and the United States?

Parallel Lives for Two World War Writers

In their personal lives and political views Orwell and Steinbeck weren’t so different, despite Orwell’s distinct Englishness and Steinbeck’s individualistic Americanism. Born too late to fight in World War I, their paths could have converged in London during the darkest days of World War II, though a meeting was unlikely for reasons that will become clear. As adults who came to age following World War I, each writer defied family expectations, rejected their Anglican faith, and dropped out of school to gain real-life experience for their writing among working class people during the turbulent period between 1919 and 1939. Both became pro-labor leftists in the 1930s and attempted, without success, to enlist in active service when World War II began. Both did their part in the world war against fascism using their best weapon—words.

Like George Orwell, John Steinbeck was an urban liberal activist with small-town conservative roots.

Like George Orwell, John Steinbeck was an urban liberal activist with small-town conservative roots. As a Stanford student following World War I, he witnessed America’s Big Red Scare, when hysteria about Bolsheviks, blacks, and labor unions created what Frederick Lewis Allen called a “reign of terror” by the federal government and local vigilante groups. When Red-Scare tactics were employed against Steinbeck following The Grapes of Wrath, the writer complained to the Roosevelt administration, incurring the wrath of J. Edgar Hoover, director of Roosevelt’s newly named Federal Bureau of Investigation. In post-World War II America, Steinbeck’s celebrated liberalism remained part of the public image of California’s famous pro-democracy writer. Yet George Orwell—a communist-inspired socialist with political views left of Steinbeck’s—accused Steinbeck of being the communist when the Cold War began. What change caused this charge?

Dangerous Developments in Post-World War II Events

George Orwell certainly understood the potential consequences of his Cold War list of “crypo-communists.” Wounded in 1937 while fighting with English volunteers against Franco’s fascists, Orwell was better educated and more experienced in European politics than Steinbeck, an American democrat who denied ever being a socialist or an –ist of any kind. Betrayed by Stalinist spies embedded in the anti-Franco coalition, Orwell barely escaped from Spain with his life. Who new better than Orwell the cost of being secretly accused by former comrades of taking the wrong side in an internecine struggle for partisan dominance? If Orwell’s list of suspected communists became public when the Cold War turned hot, as Orwell anticipated, those he named —including Steinbeck—could be expected to pay a price.

If Orwell’s list of suspected communists became public when the Cold War turned hot, as Orwell anticipated, those he named —including Steinbeck—could be expected to pay a price.

Why did George Orwell accuse John Steinbeck of sympathizing with Cold War Stalinism despite his own experience 10 years earlier? Part of the answer can be explained by certain elements of Orwell’s peculiar personality—extreme partisanship, English parochialism, and literary pique. As a professional book reviewer, Orwell disparaged American writing, including Steinbeck’s. His English pride was hurt by America’s rising dominance following World War I and Roosevelt’s treatment of Churchill in the closing days of World War II. His political partisanship led to paranoid illusions about the motives of opponents, particularly those within his own party. But there were more likely American writers for George Orwell accuse of being fifth-columnists for communism in the United States. What did he chose Steinbeck, whom he probably never met? Armchair psychology and what-if history aren’t always helpful, but a bit of both is required to answer this under-asked question.

Pre-World War I Babies; Pre-World War II Adults

George Orwell and John Steinbeck were born within a year of one another, middle-class children of dominant mothers and distant fathers who displayed an early aptitude to act out for the benefit of family and friends. As a boys both were bright, independent, and inventive—indulged by doting mothers and by sisters with whom they remained close. Like Orwell, Steinbeck grew up in domestic security, surrounded by hills and fields and the animals he loved. A restless college dropout, Steinbeck bummed his way to New York to haul cement and work as a reporter after digging ditches and picking crops back home. Like Steinbeck, Orwell was restless in school. Bored by life at Eton, his failure to study nixed his chances for the scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge his parents expected him to win. Enlisting at 18 in England’s Imperial Police, he was keeping an uneasy post-World War I peace in colonial Burma during the years Steinbeck dropped in and out of Stanford and worked as a day laborer with the Salinas Valley’s multicultural farm workers.

George Orwell and John Steinbeck were born within a year of one another, middle-class children of dominant mothers and distant fathers who displayed an early aptitude to act out for the benefit of family and friends.

By the late 1920s, Steinbeck was a jobless writer living in San Francisco with an unsuccessful first novel. During the same period, Orwell was washing dishes in Paris and harvesting hops in England, collecting material for Down and Out in Paris and London, his first book. Meanwhile Steinbeck married a freethinking leftist who introduced her husband to local labor organizers agitating for better conditions for field workers and Orwell married a brave socialist who joined him on the fighting front in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell’s wife died in 1945 during a botched hysterectomy. George Orwell wasn’t at her side. John Steinbeck and his wife divorced in 1943. She survived the marriage, but probably had a similar procedure at her husband’s insistence before it ended. Orwell remarried in 1949, shortly before his death. Steinbeck in 1950, the year Orwell died.

Why George Orwell and John Steinbeck Failed to Meet

Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath shortly before World War II erupted in Europe. It was his eighth book and became a bestseller at home and abroad. George Orwell published Coming Up for Air, his seventh, later the same year. It sold badly, both in England and in America. Ill and unfit for duty when England declared war against Germany in 1939, Orwell joined the Home Guard and worked as a writer, producer, and broadcaster for the BBC in London through 1943. When Hoover’s files on Steinbeck prevented him from getting a commission after America entered World War II, Steinbeck—like Orwell—put his writing in his nation’s service producing literary propaganda until he was cleared by his government to report on the war in 1943.

If the gods meant for George Orwell and John Steinbeck to meet, 1943 was their moment.

If the gods meant for George Orwell and John Steinbeck to meet, 1943 was their moment. Both writers were living in London during the early months of the year, socializing with foreign figures and writing for domestic consumption. But the 41-year-old American and the 40-year-old Englishman moved in alien worlds, distanced not by language or belief but by literary and cultural politics across the deepening Anglo-American divide. Orwell was an internationalist, a journalist who insisted that all prose—including fiction—is political. He disliked Huxley, Auden, and Isherwood, English writers of his generation who moved to America in the decade before World War I, and he considered American writers like Lewis, Anderson, and Steinbeck reactionary because their subjects were regional in focus. Chauvinistic to his core, Orwelll never traveled to America, criticized American consumerism, and publicly disparaged the decadent culture of the country he refused to visit. He also kept literary grudges, and The Grapes of Wrath had been a sensation.

Like ships passing in a storm, Orwell and Steinbeck were in London at a crucial moment without leaving a record of ever meeting. Both men were permanently changed by their World War II experience, and both went on to write books of continuing popularity that reflected the transformation produced by hot and cold world war in their political thinking. But the story behind Orwell’s accusation that Steinbeck was a communist didn’t end with World War II.

Read more in Animal Farm, 1984, and Steinbeck’s Russian Journey.

When Winston Churchill described the Soviet Union as dropping an Iron Curtain across Central Europe his speech to an American audience in 1946, George Orwell was living in London and imagining a future England under a Stalinist dictator. From Orwell’s paranoia about the Soviet Union came his masterpiece 1984. A less fortunate outcome was a set of accusatory, argumentative letters, diaries, and notebooks produced during the four years of Orwell’s remaining life, including a list of 100 or more suspected “crypto-communists” such as John Steinbeck. The late author Christopher Hitchens, Orwell’s intellectual heir and ardent defender, provided insights into the writer’s mindset in Why Orwell Matters, a convincing argument for Orwell’s continued relevance, despite lapses of judgment like the paranoid list. My friend Christopher Hitchens died in 2011. I regret now that I never asked him about Orwell’s list while he was alive.

Why Christopher Hitchens Matters

I met Christopher Hitchens while moderating a debate about socialism during the dying days of the old Soviet Union. The Iron Curtain was falling throughout Europe, and the debate organizer explained that the challenging case for socialism would be made by Christopher Hitchens, an English-born journalist whose name was new to me. Trained in political debate at Cambridge, Christopher Hitchens rarely lost an argument on any subject that engaged his interest, including democracy movements behind the Iron Curtain, post-Soviet Union U.S. politics, and the questionable existence of God. I learned this in the course of a friendship that lasted until his much too early death.

Like Orwell, Christopher Hitchens was a master of irony, irreverence, and oxymoron. A loyal friend, he was relentless in print but respectful in person. Like Orwell, he remained faithful to his early socialist ideals while criticizing communism as it developed in the Soviet Union and its Iron Curtain satellites. He shared a tough, pared-down liberalism with Orwell and (I believe) with Steinbeck as well. Its basic principles (in my own words) are relevant to the case of Orwell vs. Steinbeck:

The Seven Laws of Liberalism

* Freedom is precious.
* Truth is objective.
* Reason is essential.
* Every individual has value.
* No authority is infallible.
* God is debatable.
* History happened.

Ten Questions for Christopher Hitchens

Liberal ideals inform everything Christopher Hitchens wrote, including his short book about Orwell. I find the same values in Steinbeck, a writer of fiction less partisan or politically sophisticated than either Englishman. Orwell accused Steinbeck of favoring the Soviet Union over democracy, and neither Hitchens nor Orwell acknowledged Steinbeck’s characteristically American liberalism. In compensation for their failure, here are the questions I would ask Christopher Hitchens, Orwell’s finest defender, if I still had the chance :

1. Like Steinbeck, Orwell was a religious skeptic who clung to the King James Bible and echoed liturgical language in the cadence of his prose. Like Steinbeck, Orwell requested and received a Church of England funeral. What should we make of this paradox in the behavior of these profoundly lapsed Anglicans?
2. Like Steinbeck, Orwell was an empiricist who preferred evidence over theory and was once described as having too much common sense to be  interested in philosophy. Yet Steinbeck’s thinking about teleology and group behavior reflect similar ideas in Orwell’s social writing. What meaning can we take from this coincidence in the thinking of these covert philosophers?

Orwell was an empiricist who preferred evidence over theory and was once described as having too much common sense to be  interested in philosophy.

3. Like Steinbeck, Orwell was an anti-imperialist democrat who distrusted centralized power. This position was well-established in both writers by 1943, when each was in London. Yet I find no record that they met when they had the opportunity. What conclusion can be drawn from Orwell and Steinbeck’s failure to connect?
4. In your book you describe Orwell as “a natural Tory.” Like Steinbeck, he held old-fashioned ideas about private ownership, self-sufficiency, and family loyalty absorbed from his upbringing in a small rural town. Yet both writers remained pro-labor, small-d democrats throughout their lives. What can be inferred from this inconsistency of liberal and conservative values?

Like Steinbeck, Orwell was an anti-imperialist democrat who distrusted centralized power.

5. Unlike Steinbeck, Orwell never visited the Soviet Union. In your book you explain that Orwell “never went through a phase of Russophilia or Stalin-worship or fellow-travelling.” What conclusions can we draw from Orwell’s distant opposition to the Soviet Union and his reaction to Steinbeck’s journey behind the Iron Curtain?
6. Like Steinbeck in Vietnam, you supported America’s invasion of a foreign country, and you became an American citizen in an act of solidarity with the administration of George Bush. Unlike you, Orwell disliked America and Americans, including Steinbeck. Yet he never visited the America. What motivated Orwell’s animosity-from-a-distance toward the United States?

Orwell never went through a phase of Russophilia or Stalin-worship or fellow-travelling.

7. Unlike Orwell, Steinbeck resisted criticizing other writers in print. Orwell publicly denigrated American regionalists like Steinbeck as reactionaries by definition, and he disparaged Steinbeck’s work in his private writing. What motivated Orwell’s public criticism and private doubts about John Steinbeck?
8. Orwell’s Cold War list of “crypto-communists” included pro-Soviet Union American politicians such as Henry A. Wallace and Claude Pepper, despite their anti-imperialist, pro-labor domestic positions (also Steinbeck’s). Was there more to Orwell’s suspicions about these politicians than their support for the Soviet Union?

Unlike Orwell, Steinbeck resisted criticizing other writers in print.

9. Besides Steinbeck, Wallace, and Pepper, Orwell’s list included Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson, and Orson Welles. Yet each shared Orwell’s distrust of reactionary media moguls like Citizen Cain—William Randolph Hearst. Why did Orwell single out Steinbeck, Robeson, and Welles in his list of Iron Curtain sympathizers wihtin the United States?
10. Like Steinbeck, Orwell was deeply attracted to the ficton of Jack London, whose 1906 novel The Iron Heel—like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World—clearly influenced the writing of 1984. Yet Steinbeck’s 1942 anti-fascist piece, The Moon Is Down, apparently lacked similar appeal for Orwell. In your book you note that Orwell lashed out at other writers—including Huxley—but apologized after the fact. Did Orwell have similar second thoughts about Steinbeck before he died?

How the Soviet Union Became Orwell’s Obsession

Christopher Hitchens notes that while working for the BBC, Orwell included “the grittier work of James T. Farrell, John Steinbeck, and Archibald MacLeish” in a radio program about new writers. Orwell’s scripts were scrutinized by BBC censors to avoid offending listeners, and his on-air words didn’t always reflect his real opinion. This was clearly the case with his views on Steinbeck, who is described in Orwell’s diary as a “spurious writer” and “pseudo-naif.” Unfortunately, Steinbeck is only one example of Orwell’s muddled opinions about literary quality. In a notorious case of poor judgment, he publicly criticized W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” for lack of authenticity, credibility, or accuracy in its description of the Spanish Civil War. Today Auden’s anti-fascist masterpiece is considered by many his greatest poem.

Steinbeck is described in Orwell’s diary as a spurious writer and pseudo-naif.

Orwell’s public muttering about Auden provides another clue to his disapproval of Steinbeck. Like Aldous Huxley before him (and Christopher Hitchens years later), Auden emigrated to the United States, arriving in 1939 with the English writer Christopher Isherwood. Like Huxley and Hitchens, Auden and Isherwood were attracted by certain American freedoms—including sex—not found in England. Unlike Christopher Hitchens and George Orwell, both Auden and Isherwood were gay—card-carrying members of the “pansy left” publicly disparaged by Orwell. Orwell’s anti-American bias and anti-gay prejudice combined in his attack on Auden. In the case of Steinbeck, “anti-Soviet Union anti-Americanism” appears to have been sufficient cause for censure.

Why Christopher Hitchens’ Defense of Orwell Falls Short

In Why Orwell Matters, Christopher Hitchens defends Orwell’s list of “crypto-communists” as a harmless intellectual exercise, a game of “guessing which public figures would, or would not, sell out in the event of an invasion or a dictatorship.” He surmises that Orwell’s conservatism about sex in general and gay sex in particular was the result of Orwell’s boyhood experience as a student at St. Cyprian’s, a Dickensian hellhole where bullying, beating, and buggery were routine. But Orwell went on to Eton, where he perfected his French under Aldous Huxley and began his lifelong friendship Cyril Connolly, an openly ambisextrous editor who proved helpful to his career.

Christopher Hitchens defends Orwell’s list of crypto-communists as a harmless intellectual exercise, a game of guessing which public figures would, or would not, sell out in the event of an invasion of a dictatorship.

In the end, Christopher Hitchens’ argument fails to exculpate Orwell. Of  Orwell’s “crypto-communists,” he explains that “while a few on ‘the list’ were known personally to Orwell, most were not,” concluding that Orwell’s charge against people he didn’t know didn’t make him a “snitch.” Illiberal, inconsistent, and unconvincing. The world of 1984 is crawling with snitches whose testimony leads to torture and death at the hands of Big Brother. Every individual has value, truth is objective, and history happens. Orwell showed his list naming Steinbeck to influential friends, one of whom worked for an agency of government with the Orwellian name “Information Research Department.”

I agree with Christopher Hitchens that George Orwell still matters. But not always for the right reason. Unlike my late friend, Orwell was prejudiced against gays, Americans, and anyone he suspected of sympathy with the Soviet Union. Though if he hadn’t attacked Steinbeck, even that might not matter.