George Orwell Always in the News: Number 3

Orwell’s Publisher Caught in Controversy

Six years after Frederick Warburg published George Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four his publishing house, Secker And Warburg, was caught in controversy when he published T. Lobsang Rampa’s The Third Eye.

The controversy was dramatised in 2012 and now the BBC have repeated the play, ‘The Third Eye and the Private Eye’ by David Lemon and Mark Eccleston. It will be available to listen again on the BBC website until the 27^th May, 2015. Find it here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01ljylg

The protests against The Third Eye were lead by the Nazi mountaineer Heinrich Harrer, who became famous for his Seven Years In Tibet. How far the original controversy was intended to clarify historical matters and how far it was intended to inconvenience a progressive publishing house is not clear.

Harrer’s later apology for his SS membership was that he was young and had not learned to think for himself; in fact, he was 26. Some words of Orwell’s come to mind: ‘In Life On The Mississippi there is a queer little illustration of the central weakness of Mark Twain’s character. In the earlier part of this mainly autobiographical book the dates have been altered. Mark Twain describes his adventures as a Mississippi pilot as though he had been a boy of about seventeen at the time, whereas in fact he was a young man of nearly thirty. There is a reason for this. The same part of the book describes his exploits in the Civil War, which were distinctly inglorious. Moreover, Mark Twain started by fighting, if he can be said to have fought, on the Southern side, and then changed his allegiance before the war was over. This kind of behaviour is more excusable in a boy than in a man, whence the adjustment of the dates. It is also clear enough, however, that he changed sides because he saw that the North was going to win; and this tendency to side with the stronger whenever possible’.

What Orwell wrote of Mark Twin applies to Heinrich Harrer, who may have been an excellent climber but was a flawed human being. Twain ended his war on the decent side, a century later Harrer spent World War II as a nuisance POW in India. Glossy films cannot disguise that.

By LJH