NW6
2 December 1942
Dear Woodcock,
I’m sorry I didn’t get round to answering your letter earlier, but I am very busy these days. I am afraid I answered rather roughly in the Partisan Review controversy,18 I always do when I am attacked — however, no malice either side, I hope.
18. See 34.
I can’t help smiling at your (a) not accepting the fee after doing a broadcast for the B.B.C. & (b) “suspecting a trap” when asked to b’cast. As a matter of fact it was Mulk’s19
idea to ask you. That particular b’cast is a bit of private lunacy we indulge in once a month & I would be surprised if it is listened-in to by 500 people. In any case there is no question of getting to the Indian masses with any sort of b’cast, because they don’t possess radios, certainly not shortwave sets. In our outfit we are really only b’casting for the students, who, however, won’t listen to anything except news & perhaps music while the political situation is what it is.
19. Mulk Raj Anand.
I am sorry that what I said abt “financially profitable” rankled — I didn’t mean it to apply to you or any of the others personally, merely to the whole process of literary racketeering abt which doubtless you know as well as I do.
As to the ethics of b’casting & in general letting oneself be used by the British governing class. It’s of little value to argue abt it, it is chiefly a question of whether one considers it more important to down the Nazis first or whether one believes doing this is meaningless unless one achieves one’s own revolution first. But for heaven’s sake don’t think I don’t see how they are using me. A subsidiary point is that one can’t effectively remain outside the war & by working inside an institution like the B.B.C. one can perhaps deodorize it to some small extent. I doubt whether I shall stay in this job very much longer, but while here I consider I have kept our propaganda slightly less disgusting than it might otherwise have been. I am trying to get some of our b’casts for the Indian section published in book form.20 If this goes through you may see from the book that our b’casts, though of course much as all radio stuff is, aren’t as bad as they might be. To appreciate this you have to be as I am in constant touch with propaganda Axis & Allied. Till then you don’t realize what muck and filth is normally flowing through the air. I consider I have kept our little corner of it fairly clean.
Yours
Geo. Orwell
20. Published as Talking to India, edited by George Orwell, 1943.
1943