The most fascinating aspect of last weekend's revelation that George Orwell had sent a list of 38 writers, journalists and actors who he considered "crypto-communists, fellow travellers or inclined that way" to a secret section of the British Foreign Office in 1949 was the inclusion on it of Irish writer Peadar O'Donnell.
The revelations by historian Timothy Garton Ash, published by the Guardian, came in the week the media were celebrating the anniversary of Orwell's 100th birthday. It was, as Garton Ash put it, "an eerie greeting" from the grave. Orwell was dead within a year of shopping his peers and colleagues. The list was intended to warn against people who should not be trusted as anti-communist propagandists during the Cold War.
Orwell's list describes O'Donnell as a critic, which would tie in with his long association with the literary journal, The Bell, where he was managing editor under Sean O'Faolain, and from 1946, editor. Lawrence White, a member of the editorial team compiling the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of Irish Biography, and who has done extensive research on O'Donnell and on the history of the Irish Left generally, feels Orwell got it wrong with the Irish writer. "The purpose of Orwell's list seems to have been that the people on it should not be used as propagandists for the West, but Peadar O'Donnell would never have pretended to be any such thing."
O'Donnell, says White, didn't hesitate from co-operating with communists, a number of whom he was associated with, and would have understood the ideology of communism but adds that no evidence has emerged that he was a member of the Communist Party. "He was a leftist revolutionary, a socialist republican, but everything that he wrote about revolution would have followed a different model than that of Leninism let alone Stalinism."
Like Orwell, O'Donnell was in Spain during the Spanish civil war, though he was not a combatant. His non-fiction book, Salud!, was about the period and White remarks that of the people he writes about on the anti-Franco side he speaks most favourably of the anarchists, just as Orwell does in Homage to Catalonia. "Their reactions were parallel but O'Donnell was always looking for unity on the Left. Although he admired and praised the anarchists, he wasn't critical of the communists. I think Orwell would have resented the fact that O'Donnell didn't come out unequivocally against Stalinism, against Moscow."
The only known surviving member of the list, academic Norman Mackenzie, now 82, dismissed it as the work of a dying man whose mind was clouded by illness and bitterness about the Spanish civil war. O'Donnell is no longer with us to give his reaction, but it's a fascinating story none the less.
Incidentally, an article on O'Donnell and The Bell will appear later this year in the journal of the Ireland Institute, The Republic.
Women's hour
This June will be remembered in the publishing world as the month of two powerful women - Hillary Clinton and J.K. Rowling. No sooner had the hype and hysteria of the former's book subsided when the midnight unveiling of the latter's began. Now reviews have appeared at breakneck speed, the books are flying out of the shops and both are riding high in the bestsellers lists (see left). Sadbh was looking forward this week to that lovely oasis each morning in the bookworm's day, Book of the Week at 9.45 a.m. on BBC Radio 4. But there was to be no escaping Clinton because there she was, large as life, reading her memoir, Living History, over the airwaves. Call it saturation but there comes a point when even the greatest voyeur on this Earth must surely have had enough of Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky and what Bill did with them? Thankfully, a call to the BBC revealed what's to look forward to next week - the American novelist Sue Miller's moving memoir, The Story of My Father, about the latter's battle with Alzheimer's and the following week, Fiammetta Rocco's The Miraculous Fever Tree: Malaria, Medicine and the Cure that Changed the World.
Poets' corner
Entries are invited for the 15th annual Féile Filíochta, which the organisers say is Europe's biggest poetry competition. The prize fund from Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council is €12,300 and poems can be submitted in Irish, English, German, French, Italian, Welsh, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic and Swedish in various adult and children's categories. Details from Féile Filíochta, PO Box 6983. Blackrock, Co Dublin. See (from July 1st) www.dlroco.ie/library