Just such an excess of wartime enthusiasm, and of the Puritanism that may accompany it, led Orwell to commit his only lapse into demagogy. In May 1937 – that cruellest of months for the cause, as it was to turn out – W. H. Auden published his extraordinary poem ‘Spain’, which first appeared as a shilling pamphlet with proceeds donated to Medical Aid for the Spanish Republic. In a long and extremely moving evolution of verses, the poet attempted to express his emotion for the martyred country itself (‘that arid square, nipped off from hot Africa and soldered so crudely to inventive Europe’), to hymn its centrality in the hearts of thinking and feeling people (‘Our thoughts have bodies/ The menacing shapes of our fever/ Are precise and alive’) and to register the moral agony that was experienced by intellectuals who abandoned neutrality and decided to support the use of force by their chosen side:

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death;

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

To-day the expending of powers

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

In successive articles, one of them written for The Adelphi in 1938 and another more celebrated under the title Inside the Whale, Orwell emptied the vials of contempt over this stanza in particular. He denounced it as

a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a day in the life of a ‘good party man’. In the morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes’ interlude to stifle ‘bourgeois’ remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying. But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder… The Hitlers and the Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’, or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.

The laden sarcasm here is more than slightly thuggish; it also reflects one of Orwell’s less agreeable habits of mind, which was an instinctive prejudice against homosexuals. (Allusions to ‘pansy’ or ‘nancy’ poets elsewhere in his writing are common enough – there’s one on page 249. They are usually directed at Auden or his supposed clique, and are the only expletives uttered by Orwell that could also have been authored by Zhdanov or some other Stalinist cultural enforcer.)

Auden of course exemplified nothing of the kind; in order to believe that he was, you would have to find the words (not the phrases) ‘liquidation’ or ‘elimination’ to be ‘soothing’. His ‘brand of amoralism’ consisted in trying to be direct and honest about the consequences of going to Spain and overcoming what were essentially pacifist scruples. For example, though he broadcast propaganda for the Republican government from Valencia, he was revolted by the burning of churches – revolutionary actions which Orwell always reports and refers to with the utmost breeziness, as to be expected in time of class warfare and civil strife.