Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“HOMAGE TO CATALONIA” by George Orwell (first published 1938)

 

            Concluding my survey of George Orwell’s non-fiction books, after Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier, I come to Homage to Catalonia. In literary terms, Homage to Catalonia is the best of Orwell’s non-fiction. Unlike the two earlier books, it is a coherent narrative. It does not fall into two, largely incompatible, parts as Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier both do. It is focused on specific and unified events; and when Orwell turns to theorising, he is still focused on things related to specific events.

            The rights and wrongs of the Spanish Civil War are still much contested. (See on this blog critiques of Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War and Paul Preston’s The Spanish Holocaust). At least some people still argue about it, seeing it either as a defence of democracy (the “Loyalist” or Republican side) or as a crusade against Communism, anarchy and disorder (the “Rebel” or Nationalist side). Throughout Homage to Catalonia Orwell refers to the latter as “Fascists” and for the sake of consistency I will stick with the term in this review even if, as Orwell himself admits in some places, “Fascist” was not entirely appropriate for all those who approved of Franco’s uprising. Many on the Left loathe Homage to Catalonia because of what it says about the factions that warred with one another on the Republican side. 17 years ago (in 2006), I was part of a seminar held in Wellington on the 70^th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The papers we wrote and delivered were put together, edited by Mark Derby, and published by Canterbury University Press as Kiwi Companeros – New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War. I remember one participant of the seminar sidling up to me and telling me that Homage to Catalonia was “vastly overrated”. It was clear he was annoyed that Orwell had revealed the disunity on the Republican side when he wanted to cling to the idea of one unified people fighting heroically against Fascism.

            So much for my personal experience. Let’s give some context to Orwell’s book. The Spanish Civil War began in mid 1936. In December 1936, Orwell decided to go to Spain and fight for the Republic. [His wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy followed him and stayed in Barcelona.] A Socialist, but already wary of Communists, Orwell joined the militia of the P.O.U.M. (Partido Obrero de Unificacion Marxista – the United Marxist Workers Party), a very small party which was Marxist but partly aligned to the Syndicalist and Anarchist movement in Spain. It was hated by the [Stalinist] Communist Party.   P.O.U.M. members denounced Stalin’s “show trials” and the murder by Stalin of “Old Bolsheviks”. Orwell spent six months in Spain, most of it at the front. When he returned to England he wrote Homage to Catalonia. He offered the book to Victor Gollancz. The Communist John Strachey, who was on Gollancz’s editorial team, and Harry Pollitt, the head of the British Communist Party, condemned the book without reading it. Gollancz turned it down. Instead Frederic Warburg picked it up, and Homage to Catalonia was published by Secker and Warburg in 1938. Remember the book was published when the Spanish war was still in progress, even if it was clear that Franco was by then winning and the Republic was in retreat. Predictably the left-wing magazines and newspapers condemned the book and it did not sell, partly because there had already been so many books published about the Spanish war. It took some years to gain traction and is now regarded as a classic – certainly one of the most-read of Orwell’s books, along with Animal Farm and 1984.

The biographer Bernard Crick says that Homage to Catalonia was “closer to a literal record than anything [Orwell] wrote” and adds “The names he gave of his comrades in the line and back in Barcelona are real names, and survivors have confirmed all the main incidents he describes, whether of trench warfare or street-fighting.”
 

The book begins (Chapter 1) with Orwell experiencing Barcelona as still in a state of revolution, with working-class people now in control and Anarchist trade-unions very much organising things. This he approves and believes is a great step forward with social classes now being abolished and equality reigning. At the Lenin Barracks he signs on to the P.O.U. M. militia but he (remember he was once a policeman in Burma and knew how to handle weapons) finds the militia have few firearms and most of the recruits are untrained in warfare. Nevertheless, off they are sent to the front in Aragon. There (Chapter 2) he finds little discipline in the militia, many recruits underaged boys, almost unusable and antiquated rifles from which shots are not capable of reaching the enemy lines, and of course filthy and unsanitary trenches. He admits that the sector his militia occupies is a very quiet sector. He notes (Chapter 3) “I ought to say in passing that all the time I was in Spain I saw very little fighting. I was on the Aragon front from January to May, and between January and late March little or nothing happened… In March there was heavy fighting round Huesca, but I personally played only a small part in it. Later in June, there was the disastrous attack on Huesca in which several thousand men were killed in a single day, but I had been wounded and disabled before that happened.” He was made the equivalent of a corporal (like the Anarchists, the P.O.U.M. did not like their militia to be divided into official ranks). He was put in charge of twelve men – “an untrained mob composed mostly of boys in their teens.” However, the militias, though poorly equipped, were absolutely necessary at a time when the “Popular Army” (the Republican army) was not yet fully organised. Orwell was sent for a while (Chapter 4) to another sector, where he was put in charge of some English recruits. Again, this was a quiet sector. What he was most aware of was the way the militias and the Fascists shouted propaganda at each other through loud-speakers. At first he and his comrades refused to believe that Malaga had fallen to the Fascists, but later it was confirmed even by the left-wing press. Says Orwell: “Every man in the militia believed that the loss of Malaga was due to treachery. It was the first 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.”

Chapter 5 is the first chapter that really angered left-wing critics. In this chapter Orwell says that only once he was in Spain did he realise there was not a united “popular front” against Franco, but there were many factions and parties jostling for power in Republican Spain. He also questions whether Franco could really be classed as a Fascist. He writes: “Franco was not strictly comparable with Hitler or Mussolini. His rising was a military mutiny backed up by the aristocracy and the church, and in the main, especially at the beginning, it was an attempt not so much to impose Fascism as to restore feudalism.” He goes on to explain that in the early stages of the war, there was a genuine revolution which the urban masses wanted rather than a liberal democracy. Outside Spain, the war was presented as “Fascism versus Democracy” when in fact there was an Anarcho-Syndicalist revolution in Catalonia. But, he says, the Communists did not want a revolution. They wanted the world to believe that they were promoting liberal democracy. The Communists, originally a minor group, became more powerful because the Republic was being given weaponry by the Soviet Union. Gradually the revolutionary unionists were squeezed out of Catalan government, which now consisted of “right-wing socialists, liberals and Communists.” Orwell says that the Communists were in effect saying “prevent revolution or you get no weapons” and they were able to build up the Communist-controlled International Brigades. Reading the Spanish and English newspapers he read at the time, Orwell concludes “one of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right.”

Chapters 5, 7 and 8 have Orwell going back to the front in Aragon. Again the war there is static. There are some sallies into Fascist territory and some counter-sallies. Some minor artillery arrives and there are small duels between the two sides. At this time, Orwell befriends the peasant farmers in the region and notes that, with the former estate-owners gone, then have parcelled up the land amongst themselves – that is, they have established their own small farms; they have not collectivised in the Soviet manner. He gives a lively account of a night attack, in which he took part, against a Fascist stronghold, experiencing fear of the darkness and the enemy’s machine-guns. But the stronghold was not taken. He notices that the Republic’s newspapers are repeatedly claiming that Huesca will be taken from the Fascists… but it never is. Orwell rhapsodises about the sense of comradeship, equality and classlessness he felt when among the P.O.U.M. and Anarchist militias. He writes (Chapter 8) that he: “breathed the air of equality. I am well aware that it is now the fashion to deny that Socialism has anything to do with equality. In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy ‘proving’ that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab motive left intact. ”

But on leave to Barcelona, Orwell discovers (Chapter 9) that the revolution there no longer exists. The upper- and middle-classes have taken over again with the new authority of “right-wing socialists, liberals and Communists.” Prices for food have risen, making it more difficult for the working-classes to be fed. There are fancy shops and restaurants that only the wealthy can afford to patronise. Much of the populace isn’t concerned with the war against Franco, because the front is so far away. And the “Popular Army”, armed in part by the Soviet Union, is not giving arms to the Anarchist and P.O.U.M.  militias. There is growing tension between Anarchists and Communists. 

 

And so (Chapter 10) we come to what Hugh Thomas called “the civil war within the civil war”. The Anarchists take over the central telephone exchange. The Popular Army (partly controlled by the Communists) takes up strategic sites around the city. At first the shooting is desultory. Armed with a rifle, Orwell watches over the P.O.U.M. headquarters from a rooftop. He is one hoping to keep in check the Civil Guards, who are enemies of the Anarchists. But then Assault Troops are brought into Barcelona from Valencia (at the time the capital of Republican Spain) and, in May 1937,  the real shooting begins. The P.O.U.M. is denounced by the Communists as a “Trotskyite” 5^th column working for the Fascists. Communist newspapers in England and France claim that a Fascist uprising is being quelled. At which point (Chapter 11) Orwell analyses the separate factions that were involved and the course of events. The Anarchists took over the central telephone exchange to assert workers’ rights and to prevent the centralisation of important utilities. They were not starting a coup and they were definitely not Fascists. The Assault Guards were brought in to assert a centralised government – in Valencia – and to minimise what had been Catalan autonomy. The Catalan flags were all pulled down and the red-gold-purple flags of the centralised Republic took their place. Orwell (probably underestimating) says that about 400 Anarchists and P.O.U.M. people were killed in the government’s crushing of the non-existent coup. Orwell then turns to how this was [mis-]reported in the press around the world. Orwell focuses on the Daily Worker in England, which carried completely fabricated and fictional stories about what had happened in Barcelona, many of them created by “Frank Pitcairn”. It was “Pitcairn” invented the story that the P.O.U.M. leader Andres Nin had fled the country. In fact Nin had been tortured and then killed in a Communist cell. (Perhaps when he wrote Homage to Catalonia, Orwell was not aware that “Frank Pitcairn” was really the then-Communist provocateur Claud Cockburn who edited the propaganda sheet The Week ). From personal observation of what had happened in Barcelona, Orwell was able to show how many forgeries and contradictions there were in the Communist version of events. He suggests (Chapter 12) that, should the Republicans win the war against Franco, they would probably set up some form of dictatorship, even if it was not as severe as what Franco offered….

… And then he went back to the front near Huesca. And one day when he was, in all his height, standing up in a trench, he was shot in the neck by a Fascist sniper. He gives an account in agonising slow-motion of what happened. There followed the bumpy ride as he was carried for miles in a stretcher, then a painful journey in a truck over rough roads, then a long train journey in crammed carriages, and finally to a hospital where his throat slowly healed. He notes that the nurses were eager to help, but were very poorly trained, perhaps because before the civil war began, most Spanish nurses were nuns.

            Having killed many P.O.U.M. members, the government was now pushed by the Communists into completely outlawing the P.O.U.M, which meant that there were now round-ups and many people thrown into jails without charge or trial. This included foreigners who had joined P.O.U.M. militias, which meant that Orwell and his wife were now marked people when he returned to Barcelona (Chapter 13). George and Eileen spent some days in hiding and some days in working out ways to leave the country. In this time Orwell also, without success, tried to get an important P.O.U.M. military man out of jail. Finally, the Orwells were  able to escape to France, where George – a compulsive smoker like most men of his era – was delighted to find that cigarettes were very available when they had been very scarce in Spain. One thing that really outraged him was that the P.O.U.M. militia men, still at the front, were not allowed to get news about the suppression going on in Barcelona (all newspapers were censored). Thus, when they got back home on leave, they suddenly discovered that they were outlaws and joined others in jail. And here Homage to Catalonia ends.

            Critics of Orwell have pointed out that Orwell was witness to only some parts of Republican Spain and that he hardly saw any real action in war – but then Orwell himself admitted these facts in his book and he was quite modest about his front-line service (which was more front-line service than most of his critics had experienced). Besides, Homage to Catalonia was not and could not be a whole history of the Spanish Civil War. It was a truthful personal account of what he had witnessed. More than anything, Orwell’s critics were annoyed that Orwell had shown there was really no united movement for a “defence of democracy” in the Republican cause, but rather many factions and parties that were often un-co-ordinated and had very different aims. Liberal democracy or right-wing Socialism or Anarchism or Syndicalism or Communism or anti-Stalinist Marxism? Those opposed to Fascism didn’t play as a team.

            Four years after he wrote Homage to Catalonia, and when the Spanish Civil War was over, Orwell wrote an essay called Looking Back on the Spanish War. It is now appended to most editions of Homage to Catalonia. In it, Orwell says it was in Spain that he learnt that much reportage is absolute lies. He saw this as the end of respect for objective truth. He was right, of course.

Footnote: In Anna Funder’s take-down of Orwell called Wifedom, she criticises Orwell for more-or-less cutting his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy out of his narrative of Spain. She might have a point. In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell refers to Eileen as “my wife”, only once or twice giving her name and not reporting the detailed and important work she did for him in Barcelona. Not that this compromises what he said about factions and suppression.

Photo of (circled) tall George Orwell with P.O.U.M. comrades at the front, posing with weapon. And crouching at Orwell's side is (circled) his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy.