Homage to Catalonia

General map of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). Key

Initial Nationalist zone – July 1936   Nationalist advance until September 1936   Nationalist advance until October 1937   Nationalist advance until November 1938   Nationalist advance until February 1939   Last area under Republican control     Main Nationalist centres     Main Republican centres

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Orwell served as a private, a corporal (cabo) and—when the informal command structure of the militia gave way to a conventional hierarchy in May 1937—as a lieutenant, on a provisional basis,[4] in Catalonia and Aragon from December 1936 until June 1937. In June 1937, the leftist political party with whose militia he served (the POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, an anti-Stalinist communist party) was declared an illegal organisation, and Orwell was consequently forced to flee.

Having arrived in Barcelona on 26 December 1936, Orwell told John McNair, the Independent Labour Party's (ILP) representative there, that he had "come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism." He also told McNair that "he would like to write about the situation and endeavour to stir working class opinion in Britain and France." McNair took him to the POUM barracks, where Orwell immediately enlisted.[5] "Orwell did not know that two months before he arrived in Spain, the [Soviet law enforcement agency] NKVD's resident in Spain, Aleksandr Orlov, had assured NKVD Headquarters, 'the Trotskyist organisation POUM can easily be liquidated'—by those, the Communists, whom Orwell took to be allies in the fight against Franco."[5]

By his own admission, it was somewhat by chance that Orwell joined the POUM, rather than the far larger Comintern-run International Brigades. Orwell had been told that he would not be permitted to enter Spain without some supporting documents from a British left-wing organisation, and he had first sought the assistance of the British Communist Party and put his request directly to its leader, Harry Pollitt. Pollitt "seems to have taken an immediate dislike to him ... and soon concluded that his visitor was 'politically unreliable.'"[6] Orwell then telephoned the headquarters of the ILP, and its officials agreed to help him. The party was willing to accredit him as a correspondent for the New Leader, the ILP's weekly paper with which he was familiar, and thus provided the means for him to go legitimately to Spain.[7] The ILP issued him a letter of introduction to their representative in Barcelona and was affiliated with the POUM. Orwell's experiences, culminating in his and his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy's narrow escape from the communist purges in Barcelona in June 1937,[8] greatly increased his sympathy for the POUM and, while not affecting his moral and political commitment to socialism, made him a lifelong anti-Stalinist.

Orwell served on the Aragon front for 115 days. It was not until the end of April 1937 that he was granted leave and was able to see his wife Eileen in Barcelona again. Eileen wrote on 1 May that she found him, "a little lousy, dark brown, and looking really very well." At this point he was convinced that he would have the chance to see more action if he joined the International Brigades and fought with them on the Madrid front; his attitude was still one of exasperation in the face of the rivalries between the various factions. This "changed dramatically in the first week of May when he found himself and his comrades under fire not from the Nationalist enemy but from their left-wing 'allies'" in the fighting that followed the government effort to take control of the Telephone Exchange.[9] The Spanish government was seeking to assert direct control on Barcelona which, as part of Revolutionary Catalonia, was chiefly in the hands of the anarchists. The government decided to occupy the telephone building and to disarm the workers; the anarcho-syndicalist CNT staff resisted, and street fighting followed, in which Orwell was caught up. The struggle was called off by the CNT leaders after four days. Large numbers of government reinforcements arrived from Valencia.[10]

On 17 May 1937, Largo Caballero resigned and Juan Negrín became prime minister. The NKVD-controlled secret police pursued its persecution of those who opposed the Moscow line. Antony Beevor notes that on 16 June, when the POUM was declared illegal, "the Communists turned its headquarters in Barcelona into a prison for 'Trotskyists' ... leaders were handed over to NKVD operatives and taken to a secret prison in Madrid ... Andreu Nin taken to Alcalá de Henares, where he was interrogated from 18 to 21 June ... he was then moved to a summer house outside the city which belonged to the wife of Hidalgo de Cisneros and tortured to death ... Diego Abad de Santillan remarked; 'Whether Juan Negrín won with his communist cohorts, or Franco won with his Italians and Germans, the results would be the same for us.'"[11] At the front, Orwell was shot through the throat by a sniper on 20 May 1937 and nearly killed. He wrote in Homage to Catalonia that people frequently told him a man who is hit through the neck and survives is the luckiest creature alive, but that he personally thought "it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." After having his wounds dressed at a first aid post about half a mile from the front line, he was transferred to Barbastro and then to Lérida, where he received only an external treatment of his wound. On the 27th he was transferred to Tarragona, and on the 29th from there to Barcelona. On 23 June 1937, Orwell and Eileen, with John McNair and Stafford Cottman, a young English POUM militiaman, boarded the morning train from Barcelona to Paris. They safely crossed into France. Sir Richard Rees later wrote that the strain of her experience in Barcelona showed clearly on Eileen's face: "In Eileen Blair I had seen for the first time the symptoms of a human being living under a political terror."[12] On 13 July 1937, a deposition was presented to the Tribunal for Espionage & High Treason, Valencia, charging the Orwells with 'rabid Trotskyism' and being agents of the POUM.[13]

Orwell and Eileen returned to England. After nine months of animal husbandry and writing up Homage to Catalonia at their cottage at Wallington, Hertfordshire, Orwell's health declined, and he had to spend several months at a sanatorium in Aylesford, Kent. The trial of the leaders of the POUM and of Orwell (in his absence) took place in Barcelona, in October and November 1938. Observing events from French Morocco, Orwell wrote that they were "only a by-product of the Russian Trotskyist trials and from the start every kind of lie, including flagrant absurdities, has been circulated in the Communist press."[14] Barcelona fell to Franco's forces on 26 January 1939.[15]

Because of the book's criticism of the Stalinists in Spain, it was rejected by Gollancz, who had previously published all Orwell's books: "Gollancz is of course part of the Communism-racket," Orwell wrote to Rayner Heppenstall in July 1937. Orwell finally found a sympathetic publisher in Frederic Warburg. Warburg was willing to publish books by the dissident left, that is, by socialists hostile to Stalinism.[8]

The book was finally published in April 1938, but according to John Newsinger, "made virtually no impact whatsoever and by the outbreak of war with Germany had sold only 900 copies"; Newsinger maintained that "the Communist vendetta against the book" was maintained as recently as 1984, when Lawrence and Wishart published Inside the Myth, a collection of essays "bringing together a variety of standpoints hostile to Orwell in an obvious attempt to do as much damage to his reputation as possible."[8]

The following summary is based on a later edition of the book which contains some amendments that Orwell requested: two chapters (formerly chapters five and eleven) describing the politics of the time were moved to appendices. Orwell felt that these chapters should be moved so that readers could ignore them if they wished; the chapters, which became appendices, were journalistic accounts of the political situation in Spain, and Orwell felt these were out of place in the midst of the narrative.

Chapter one

The book begins in late December 1936. Orwell describes the atmosphere in Barcelona as it appears to him. "The anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing ... It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle ... every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle ... every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized." "The Anarchists" (referring to the Spanish CNT and FAI) were "in control", tipping was prohibited by workers themselves, and servile forms of speech, such as "Señor" or "Don", were abandoned. He goes on to describe the scene at the Lenin Barracks (formerly the Lepanto Barracks) where militiamen were given "what was comically called 'instruction'" in preparation for fighting at the front.

"There were still women serving in the militias, though not very many. In the early battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course." (Barcelona, 1936. Militiawomen on beach near Barcelona. Photo: Gerda Taro).[16]

He describes the deficiencies of the POUM workers' militia, the absence of weapons, the recruits mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen ignorant of the meaning of war, half-complains about the sometimes frustrating tendency of Spaniards to put things off until "mañana" (tomorrow), notes his struggles with Spanish (or more usually, the local use of Catalan). He praises the generosity of the Catalan working class. Orwell leads to the next chapter by describing the "conquering-hero stuff"—parades through the streets and cheering crowds—that the militiamen experienced at the time he was sent to the Aragón front.

Chapter four

After some three weeks at the front, Orwell and the other English militiaman in his unit, Williams, join a contingent of fellow Englishmen sent out by the Independent Labour Party to a position at Monte Oscuro, within sight of Zaragoza. "Perhaps the best of the bunch was Bob Smillie—the grandson of the famous miners' leader—who afterwards died such an evil and meaningless death in Valencia." In this new position he witnesses the sometimes propagandistic shouting between the Rebel and Loyalist trenches and hears of the fall of Málaga. "... every man in the militia believed that the loss of Malaga was due to treachery. It was the first talk I had heard of treachery or divided aims. It set up in my mind the first vague doubts about this war in which, hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple." In February, he is sent with the other POUM militiamen 50 miles to make a part of the army besieging Huesca; he mentions the running joke phrase, "Tomorrow we'll have coffee in Huesca," attributed to a general commanding the Government troops who, months earlier, made one of many failed assaults on the town.

"I knew that I was serving in something called the P.O.U.M. (I had only joined the P.O.U.M. militia rather than any other because I happened to arrive in Barcelona with I.L.P. papers), but I did not realise that there were serious differences between the political parties." (Republican soldiers, June 1937. Photo: Gerda Taro).

Chapter eleven

Orwell tells us of his various movements between hospitals in Siétamo, Barbastro, and Monzón while getting his discharge papers stamped, after being declared medically unfit. He returns to Barcelona only to find that the POUM had been "suppressed": it had been declared illegal the very day he had left to obtain discharge papers and POUM members were being arrested without charge. "The attack on Huesca was beginning ... there must have been numbers of men who were killed without ever learning that the newspapers in the rear were calling them Fascists. This kind of thing is a little difficult to forgive." He sleeps that night in the ruins of a church; he cannot go back to his hotel because of the danger of arrest.

"And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading ... consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan ... beware of my partisanship, ... and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war." (Ch. XII)

La Sagrada Família in 1980 "When Orwell speaks about the cathedral of Barcelona, he is talking in fact about La Sagrada Família temple, designed by Antoni Gaudí ..."[19] "... I went to have a look at the cathedral—a modern cathedral, and one of the most hideous buildings in the world. It has four crenellated spires exactly the shape of hock bottles ... I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up ... though they did hang a red and black banner between its spires."(Ch. XII)

Contemporary reviews of the book were mixed. Notably positive reviews came from Geoffrey Gorer in Time and Tide, and from Philip Mairet in the New English Weekly. Geoffrey Gorer concluded, "Politically and as literature it is a work of first-class importance." Philip Mairet observed, "It shows us the heart of innocence that lies in revolution; also the miasma of lying that, far more than the cruelty, takes the heart out of it." Hostile notices came from The Tablet, where a critic wondered why Orwell had not troubled to get to know Fascist fighters and enquire about their motivations, and from The Times Literary Supplement and The Listener, "the first misrepresenting what Orwell had said and the latter attacking the POUM, but never mentioning the book."[21] John Langdon-Davies wrote in the Communist Party's Daily Worker that "the value of the book is that it gives an honest picture of the sort of mentality that toys with revolutionary romanticism but shies violently at revolutionary discipline. It should be read as a warning."[22] Some Conservative and Catholic opponents of the Spanish Republic felt vindicated by Orwell's attack on the role of the Communists in Spain; The Spectator's review concluded that this "dismal record of intrigue, injustice, incompetence, quarrelling, lying communist propaganda, police spying, illegal imprisonment, filth and disorder," was evidence that the Republic deserved to fall.[23] A mixed review was supplied by V. S. Pritchett who called Orwell naïve about Spain but added that "no one excels him in bringing to the eyes, ears and nostrils the nasty ingredients of fevered situations; and I would recommend him warmly to all who are concerned about the realities of personal experience in a muddled cause."[24] Franz Borkenau, in a letter to Orwell of June 1938, called the book, together with his own The Spanish Cockpit, a complete "picture of the revolutionary phase of the Spanish War."

According to Raymond Carr:[25]

The Spanish Civil war produced a spate of bad literature. Homage to Catalonia is one of the few exceptions and the reason is simple. Orwell was determined to set down the truth as he saw it. This was something that many writers of the Left in 1936–39 could not bring themselves to do. Orwell comes back time and time again in his writings on Spain to those political conditions in the late thirties which fostered intellectual dishonesty: the subservience of the intellectuals of the European Left to the Communist 'line', especially in the case of the Popular Front in Spain where, in his view, the party line could not conceivably be supported by an honest man. Only a few strong souls, Victor Serge and Orwell among them, could summon up the courage to fight the whole tone of the literary establishment and the influence of Communists within it. Arthur Koestler quoted to an audience of Communist sympathizers Thomas Mann's phrase, 'In the long run a harmful truth is better than a useful lie'. The non-Communists applauded; the Communists and their sympathizers remained icily silent. ... It is precisely the immediacy of Orwell's reaction that gives the early sections of Homage its value for the historian. Kaminski, Borkenau, Koestler came with a fixed framework, the ready-made contacts of journalist intellectuals. Orwell came with his eyes alone.

After years of neglect Homage to Catalonia re-emerged in the 1950s, following on from the success of Orwell's later books. The publication in 1952 of the first US edition (by Harcourt, Brace, of New York) with an influential introduction by Lionel Trilling, "elevated Orwell to the rank of a secular saint." Another twist arrived in the late 1960s when the book "found new readers in an age of student radicalism and guerrilla struggle—Orwell being seen as an early Che Guevara and [the book] now appeared to offer a premonition of the Soviet suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring."[26] The book was praised by Noam Chomsky.[27] Its popularity has continued, notably with Ken Loach's heavily Orwell-influenced film Land and Freedom. Republished by Penguin Books in Britain in 1962, it has never been out of print since, and remains far better known than Franz Borkenau's The Spanish Cockpit, a book Orwell himself had called, in July 1937, "the best book yet written on the subject" of the Spanish war.[28]

"In Catalonia (in 1997), a square near the Barcelona waterfront was named Plaça George Orwell, while a street in the town of Can Rull was named [Carrer] Andrés Nin ... the history of the Civil War that is taught to Catalan schoolchildren now includes Orwell, and has been wiped clean of any totalitarian or revisionist taint."[29]

Homage to Catalonia was commercially unsuccessful, only selling 638 copies,[30] but Barcelona under the Anarchists would remain with Orwell. "No one who was in Spain during the months when people still believed in the revolution will ever forget that strange and moving experience. It has left something behind that no dictatorship, not even Franco's, will be able to efface."[31] In the words of a recent biographer, Gordon Bowker, "the people that had effaced that reality, the Soviet Communists, now had an implacable enemy they would come to regret having made." Christopher Hitchens: "The narrative core of Homage to Catalonia, it might be argued, is a series of events that occurred in and around the Barcelona telephone exchange in early May 1937. Orwell was a witness to these events, by the relative accident of his having signed up with the militia of the anti-Stalinist POUM upon arriving in Spain ... he became convinced that he had been the spectator of a full-blown Stalinist putsch ... Moreover, he came to understand that much of the talk about discipline and unity was a rhetorical shield for the covert Stalinization of the Spanish Republic."[32]

On 26 April 1937 when Orwell and his ILP comrades had returned to Barcelona on their leave they had been shocked to see how things had changed. The revolutionary atmosphere of four months earlier had all but evaporated, and old class divisions been reasserted. Similarly, as he headed for the French border on the train to Port Bou, Orwell noticed another symptom of the change since his arrival—the train on which classes had been abolished now had both first-class compartments and a dining car. Bowker reports that "Orwell mused that coming into Spain the previous year, bourgeois-looking people would be turned back at the border by Anarchist guards; now looking bourgeois gave one easy passage".[33] A simple hostility to Stalinist Communism became a "deep-dyed loathing of it". After reviewing Koestler's best-selling Darkness at Noon, Orwell decided that fiction was the best way to describe totalitarianism. Animal Farm, "his scintillating 1944 satire on Stalinism",[34][30] would be part of his response to the Spanish betrayal. "He had learned a hard lesson, especially about the new political Europe. Totalitarianism, the new creed of 'the streamlined men' of Fascism and Communism, was a new manifestation of Orwell's old Catholic enemy, the doctrine of Absolutism ... the ghost of Torquemada had arisen, imprisonment without trial, confessions extracted under torture with summary executions to follow."[35] "The essential fact about a totalitarian regime is that it has no laws. People are not punished for specific offences, but because they are considered to be politically or intellectually undesirable. What they have done or not done is irrelevant."[36]

Even after Hitler had repudiated his non-aggression pact with Stalin by launching Operation Barbarossa and most left-wing intellectuals were to "laud the virtues of the Soviet Union at the tops of their voices [and] even on the right, keeping Uncle Joe sweet was regarded as mandatory—Orwell went on insisting that the Soviet regime was a tyranny. Even as the Red Army battled the Panzers to a standstill on the outskirts of Moscow. At this distance, it is hard to imagine what a lonely line this was to take. But when it came to a principle Orwell was the sort of man who would rather shiver in solitude than hold his tongue."[37]

Apart from the betrayal of the POUMists, the terror and the murder of Nin and Smillie, Orwell had been depressed by the attitude of the British press. "In Spain ... I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts ... I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various party lines."[38] Carr writes, "He was appalled at the treatment of the May days as a 'Trotskyist Revolt' in papers like the News Chronicle which simply swallowed uncritically the Communist line; or Ralph Bates' report in The New Republic that POUM militiamen were playing football with Fascist troops ... Given this supresio vero by interested parties, how could true history be written? Propaganda would pass as truth; 'facts' could be manipulated. Those who monopolized communication could create their own history after the event—the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four."[39] Orwell attacked sections of the left wing press for suppressing the truth about Spain, indicting the Communists for instigating a "reign of terror"; and he never forgave Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman who turned down his articles on the Spanish Civil War on the grounds that they "could cause trouble." Malcolm Muggeridge remembered: "Once when we were lunching at a Greek restaurant in Percy Street he asked me if I would mind changing places. I readily agreed but asked him why. He said that he just couldn't bear to look at Kingsley Martin's corrupt face, which, as Kingsley was lunching at an adjoining table, was unavoidable from where he had been sitting before."[40] "Ten years ago it was almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Communism; today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or 'Trotskyism'," Orwell wrote bitterly in 1938.[41]

Yet Orwell "had felt what socialism could be like"[42] and, according to Bowker, unlike the writer John Dos Passos for example, "who also had a friend killed in custody by the SIM (Servicio de Investigación Militar/Spanish Secret Police) in Spain, and reacted by deserting the Communists and shifting decidedly to the right, Orwell never did abandon his socialism: if anything, his Spanish experience strengthened it."[43] In a letter to Cyril Connolly, written on 8 June 1937, Orwell said, "At last I really believe in Socialism which I never did before". A decade later he wrote: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."[1]

In the opening lines of the book, Orwell describes an Italian militiaman he met at the Lenin Barracks and to whose memory Orwell would dedicate a poem "nearly two years later, when the war was visibly lost". The poem was included in Orwell's 1942 essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War", published in New Road in 1943.[44]

The closing phrase of the poem, "No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit", was later taken by George Woodcock for the title of his Governor General's Award-winning critical study of Orwell and his work, The Crystal Spirit (1966).[45]

• Anarchist Catalonia
• Bibliography of George Orwell
• ILP Contingent described in Homage to Catalonia
• Les grands cimetières sous la lune
• Spanish Revolution
• William Herrick 'an American Orwell', also disillusioned by Stalinism in Spain

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Homage to Catalonia

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