Claud Cockburn was a British journalist of the 1930s and later—dapper, high-society, and left-wing—whose historic role was, by going about his own business, to reveal to George Orwell something peculiar and troubling about human nature.
A biography of Cockburn resembles in this respect a biography of an artist’s model—one of Picasso’s models, say—who might have lived an interesting life, in the way that anyone might do, but whose true significance rested on her bone structure and ability to hold a pose sufficiently to allow the artist to discern something previously unremarked in the human form. What Cockburn revealed to Orwell was a species of nihilism. This was a nihilism whose style was charming instead of intense, therefore hard to detect, but ultimately repellent, except to people who go for that sort of thing, which turns out to be a lot of people.
Cockburn’s biographer is his loyal son Patrick Cockburn, who is himself a journalist of anti-establishmentarian renown (and is the brother of Andrew Cockburn and the late Alexander Cockburn, journalists of similar renown, as well as an uncle of Olivia Wilde, the actress). And Patrick captures something of his father’s spirit in the title of his book, Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied, which is a quotation attributed to Claud himself. The quotation is notable for its concision, wit, and self-assurance. The tone conveys a satisfaction at being superior to the lowly resentments of people who get upset at being lied to.
And the vim and panache in those few words conjure the liveliness of a man who was “inexhaustibly cocky and funny,” in the description of his friend Christopher Isherwood, “like a street-boy throwing stones at pompous windows”—except that, instead of being a street boy, Claud Cockburn was the elegant descendant of Admiral Sir George Cockburn, eighth baronet, who burned the White House on behalf of the British Empire in the War of 1812.
Cockburn’s family and upbringing—his cousin Evelyn Waugh, his schoolboy friendship with Graham Greene, his life at Oxford in the 1920s—brought him as if by escalator to The Times of London and what promised to be a glorious career in the upper reaches of British journalism.
But his rebellious impulse was, in fact, irrepressible, and it prompted him, after a while, to step off the escalator and take up the risky vocation of independent reporter and publisher, answerable only to his own ideals. His son Patrick lovingly pastes onto those ideals a series of approbatory clichés: “standing firmly with the have-nots against the haves,” “a ceaseless campaign against the powerful on behalf of the powerless,” and so forth, unto Robin Hood, David, Goliath, and the slingstone.
Cockburn’s family and upbringing—his cousin Evelyn Waugh, his schoolboy friendship with Graham Greene, his life at Oxford in the 1920s—brought him as if by escalator to The Times of London and what promised to be a glorious career.
And yet a more skeptical reader may notice that, in leaving The Times behind, Cockburn merely leapt from the upper reaches of British journalism to the upper reaches of Soviet journalism. By the middle 1930s, his new set of friends and editors turned out to be the chieftains of the Soviet propaganda machine, whose purpose was to promote Joseph Stalin and his policies, principal among which was the Great Purge. This was Stalin’s program to slander his rivals on the left, both among the Communists and within the non-Communist left, as Fascist agents, and then, as the Stalinists used to say, to “liquidate” them.
In 1936, Spain dissolved into civil war, and Stalin directed his supporters there to go into battle against the Spanish Fascists. Here was Cockburn’s moment. He enlisted in the Spanish Republican Army. He fought valorously. But he also contributed reports to the Communist press designed to convince the world that non-Stalinist left-wingers in Spain were Fascist agents—they were not—and ought to be liquidated.
It was Cockburn’s misfortune, however, that George Orwell, too, made his way to Spain. Orwell was horrified to discover the nature of Communist journalism, especially the flippant mendacities of a reporter called “Frank Pitcairn,” who happened to be Cockburn. Orwell’s masterpiece of journalism on these themes, Homage to Catalonia, recorded his shock. And in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he generalized his observations into a portrait of modern totalitarianism and its mentality. In this way, “Frank Pitcairn,” the Soviet propagandist, has taken his place in world literature not as an author in his own right but as an object of condemnation, akin to the miserable sinners flayed by Dante in the “Inferno.”
But I should emphasize that Cockburn’s son looks on these controversies in a more sympathetic light. In Patrick’s view, Cockburn did not really lie about the non-Stalinist left in Spain, even if he might have been, in his own worsd, “misinformed.” The dispute with Orwell? A minor “spat.” Why Orwell would go on to write so astringently and memorably about the lie-dispensing Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four Patrick does not say.
Orwell was horrified to discover the nature of Communist journalism, especially the flippant mendacities of a reporter called “Frank Pitcairn,” who happened to be Cockburn.
He makes plain that his father radiated glamour and sex appeal. One of his wives was the intrepid Jean Ross, who was immortalized as “Sally Bowles” in Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories and the musical Cabaret. But chiefly Patrick maintains that Claud Cockburn was a dedicated anti-Fascist, and the greatest of his scoops was the sign of it. This was an exposé of the “Cliveden set” in England during the later 1930s—wealthy and powerful people who, from behind the scenes, maneuvered to prevent the United Kingdom from adopting an anti-Nazi posture.
And yet a shadow long ago fell across even this highest achievement of Cockburn’s career. In 1939, Hitler and Stalin, having struck up their alliance, launched the Second World War. A lonely United Kingdom rose to the challenge, and even the Cliveden set rallied in support. It was Claud Cockburn who came out against the war, which ought not to have been possible, given his views on David, Goliath, the slingstone, Robin Hood, the powerless, and the have-nots.
Patrick supposes that his father’s righteous animus against the British high elite temporarily clouded his judgment, and his abandonment of anti-Fascism at the outset of World War II was still another honest error. But it is odd to have to point out after these many years that Cockburn was consistent, and he opposed war against Germany because Hitler was, after all, Stalin’s ally, if only for a while, and subservience to Stalin was the actual principle.
Only, why the subservience? The single most fascinating detail in Patrick’s book is the revelation that his father’s friends among the Soviet journalists always knew that, sooner or later, Stalin was going to have them executed—and even so, their own subservience flagged not a whit. A Stalinist firing squad was never going to be Claud Cockburn’s fate. And yet he too seems to have felt the allure of self-immolation, and cheerfully and even humorously he threw away what is dearest to journalists, which was his reputation.
This is what Orwell understood. It was a desertion of values, unto a rejection of oneself. Orwell also understood that nihilism of this kind was more than a quirk of the Stalin era, which is why he set Nineteen Eighty-Four in the future. (I think we are seeing another variant right now of the same nihilism, the desire to be destructive and suicidal at the same time, in the name of a Utopian fantasy, this time theological, among Hamas’s champions.) It is a human proclivity. It is perennial.
Someday a different biographer may look more deeply into the mystery of Claud Cockburn, the twisted aristocrat. And I hope that, if so, the different biographer will drag a bright forensic light from the writings of Orwell into the examination room, and these questions about ideals, lies, and self-destruction can be usefully dissected, not just in regard to bygone times.
Paul Berman is the author of several books, including A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 and Terror and Liberalism
