The Duty to Stand AsideNineteen Eighty-Four and the Wartime Quarrel of George Orwell and Alex Comfort The summer of 1943 found George Orwell, English socialist man of letters, reaching the end of his patience with his job at the BBC. The cultural programs and commentary he''d been producing for the Indian and East Asian outposts of the British Empire were designed to counter German wartime radio transmissions. These broadcasts were not quite propaganda: he was allowed "reasonable freedom of speech" despite being (in his words) "an independent and more or less ''agin the government'' commentator" and he could contribute to outside publications as well. But the job was boring. After two years at the network, Orwell, who had just turned 40, longed to go back to his own writing and journalism. One of the poets whose work Orwell featured occasionally on his cultural programs was Alex Comfort, a talented 22-year-old who was taking medical training at the Royal London Hospital and beginning work as a research biologist. Neither man was spending World War II in the military. Orwell, who had been badly wounded while fighting in the Spanish Civil War and was showing signs of the tuberculosis that would ultimately kill him, was declared unfit for military service.

Wishing passionately to contribute to this new war against fascism, he applied repeatedly to enlist but had to settle for a volunteer slot in Britain''s civil defense force, the rag-tag, ill-equipped Home Guard. There was never any question of Comfort serving in any capacity except as a medic or firewatcher during air raids: he was missing three and a half fingers of his left hand, the result of a botched attempt to make gunpowder for fireworks at age 14. But it''s certain that he would not have enlisted even if he could. Comfort was a dedicated, outspoken anarchist and pacifist who charged at every possible opportunity that Britain''s wartime leaders were ordering atrocities as bad as many of Hitler''s, and that intellectuals who did not denounce their own government had "sacrificed their responsible attitude to humanity." He made it his business in particular to expose as war crimes the British and American air raids against German and occupied cities--a campaign the allies'' political leaders hailed as the key to victory and that was quite popular with the public to boot. Not surprisingly, given their vastly different attitudes about the conflict, the two men attacked each other repeatedly in print. Orwell initiated the exchange with a review of Comfort?s first novel; it continued principally in the American magazine Partisan Review and the British social democratic newspaper Tribune ?the latter in the form of an exchange of verse that summer of 1943 that became a minor classic of English polemic poetry?and in private conversation and correspondence. But their relationship was more complicated than this suggests.

Simultaneously, they developed a cautious friendship based on Orwell''s admiration for Comfort''s poetry--although his fiction, not so much--and Comfort''s respect for Orwell''s incisive political commentary as well as his conduct as a Loyalist volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. That friendship grew into an active collaboration when the government began prosecuting anarchists and antiwar activists toward the end of the war. It cooled when the Cold War again highlighted their ideological differences, but it endured, at least so far as Comfort knew, until just before Orwell''s death in 1950. By then, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four had been published and Orwell was on his way to becoming one of the most admired writers and moral voices of the postwar era?although from multiple, vastly different political perspectives. Comfort would become a well-known and controversial figure in Britain in 1961, when he and 31 other anti-nuclear activists were sentenced to a month in prison for organizing a mass sit-in in Trafalgar Square; in 1972 he would achieve worldwide bestsellerdom when his illustrated manual for couples, The Joy of Sex , was published. Comfort, who died a half-century after Orwell, always held a deep admiration for his onetime sparring partner, and although they only met in person once, regarded him as a friend. Writing 30 years after Orwell?s passing, Comfort regretted the tone they had taken in their wartime quarrel. "We had publicly misrepresented one another," he wrote.

"I probably mistook him for a hard-line Marxist, while he mistook me for another of [John] Middleton Murry''s equivocal disciples," alluding to the poet and critic who had notoriously written that Hitler was "doing the dirty work of the Lord" and whose literary journal, the Adelphi , had helped launch both Orwell''s and Comfort''s literary careers. While they disagreed sharply about the morality of war, collaboration with the State, and later about the predicament that the Cold War created for artists and writers outside the Iron Curtain, Comfort believed he and Orwell were essentially on the same side: against authoritarianism and in favor of a society that relied more on cooperation and community than on capitalism and an overweening State. For the most part, he was right. But in the 1990s it became known that in the last years of his life, as the Cold War was settling in, Orwell drew up a list of notable individuals he believed had pro-Soviet or not sufficiently anti-Soviet tendencies. He entrusted it to an employee of a propaganda branch of the Foreign Office. Included on the list were writers and economists, political activists and broadcasters, and celebrities like Charlie Chaplin and Michael Redgrave. One of the names was that of Alex Comfort. "Is pacifist-anarchist," Orwell noted.

"Main emphasis anti-British. Subjectively pro-German during war, appears temperamentally pro-totalitarian. Not morally courageous. Has a crippled hand. Very talented.".