REASSESSMENT
Homage to Catalonia
Simon Courtauld
Homage to Catalonia George Orwell (Penguin Books pp. 247, £1.50) when Fredric Warburg agreed to publish George Orwell's account of his time in Catalonia and Aragon in the early part of the Spanish Civil War, he did so without any great hopes for the book's commercial success. Fewer than 700 copies were sold in 1938, the year of publication; 12 years later, when Orwell died, the first edition of 1,500 had still not been sold. The book was published by Penguin in 1962 — and has been reprinted about ten times — but it remains one of Orwell's lesser known works.
Yet Homage to Catalonia is the watershed of Orwell's life, the fulfilment of the years he spent searching for his proletarian dream, and the prelude to the disillusion which led him to Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. '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.' So Orwell wrote in 1946; after Spain — after he had witnessed, and been a victim of, Communist tactics and propaganda in Barcelona, and the suppression of the truth about the war in the English left-wing press — he knew where he stood.
But Spain also represented for Orwell another landmark, one which has, I think, been understated in his two recent biographies. In Homage to Catalonia, for the first time in his documentary writing, Orwell told it as it happened. There was no need for elaboration or invention, and — also for the first time — he did not, in Spain, feel out of place. Orwell was never really at ease with the plongeurs in Paris and the tramps in London, nor with the people with whom he stayed in the industrial north of England. He wanted, he said, to expiate his guilt, `to find some way of getting out of the respectable world altogether'. But he was not entirely successful: he remained an outsider in a world of poverty; the poor smelled and he was not one of them. As Bernard Crick (George Orwell: A Life) has pointed out, both in Down and Out in Paris and London and, to a lesser extent, in The Road to Wigan Pier, incidents are related which almost certainly did not take place. For all the merits of these two books, there is still something factitious about them which is unsatisfying.
When Orwell arrived in Barcelona in late December 1936 he found a city taken over by Anarchists; the proletarian revolution had happened. One can sense Orwell's excitement: 'It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.' Everyone addressed each other as camarada or tu; all the shops and cafes had been collectivised; tipping was forbidden; anyone wearing a tie risked arrest as a bourgeois; even the Russian foreign minister, Litvinov, was denounced for wearing a hat. For Orwell it must have been a dream come true. He knew nothing of the various factions and parties opposed to Franco, and joined the POUM (Workers' Party for Marxist Unity) because he had an introduction through the Independent Labour Party in England. (The arguments about whether or not the POUM was a 'Trotskyist' party have been repeated often enough; it is safer to describe it as There was now no need for Orwell to embellish the facts, or to feel embarrassed among his fellow militiamen. They were all fighting against the Fascists and 'for common decency', as he put it. Joined in the common purpose, he was no longer an outsider — his accent identified him not as a member of a different class but merely as a foreigner speaking bad Spanish (there were several foreigners in his division on the Aragon front). The smells (Orwell's nose never seemed to let him down) were the smells of trench war — of mud and rats and excrement, for which the working classes could not be blamed. The honesty of Orwell's narrative is evident throughout Homage to Catalonia. Here he is reporting at his best because, one feels, he had finally found his feet; he knew that he was accepted by his comrades as soon as the Italian soldier shook his hand at the Lenin Barracks the day before he joined the militia.
Orwell was on the Aragon front from January until the end of April 1937, yet he saw very little fighting. The Fascist trenches were over 700 yards away and out of range of the militia's antiquated weapons. The bombs with which they were issued were said to be "impartial"; they killed the man they were thrown at and the man who threw them'. The first five men whom Orwell saw wounded in Spain were wounded by their own weapons. In a rare attack at night on a Fascist parapet Orwell at last had the chance to engage one of the enemy: My mind leapt backwards twenty years, to our boxing instructor at school, showing me in vivid pantomime how he had bayoneted a Turk at the Dardanelles. I gripped my rifle by the small of the butt and lunged at the man's back. He was just out of my reach. Another lunge: still out of reach. And for a little distance we proceeded like this, he rushing up the trench and I after him on the ground above, prodding at his shoulderblades and never quite getting there — a comic memory for me to look back upon, though I suppose it seemed less comic to him.
On another occasion Orwell refrained from shooting at a Fascist because the man was half-dressed and holding up his trousers. It is typical of Orwell that he constantly plays down his own part in the fighting. The only shot he fired in the fiveday street battles in Barcelona, he tells us, was at an unexploded bomb; and he missed. In fact others have attested to his bravery in Spain and, when he was given a command, to his qualities of leadership.
While not much was happening in the hills around Saragossa and Huesca, Orwell is able brilliantly to describe the conditions and the atmosphere of war: 'In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Saragossa front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last.' When the shells were coming over they 'sounded like nothing so much as a man riding along on a bicycle and whistling.' The shells of the trench-mortars were 'shaped like the darts thrown in public-houses and about the size of a quart bottle; they go off with a devilish metallic crash, as of some monstrous globe of brittle steel being shattered on an anvil.' And who would not share Orwell's sentiments about getting mixed up in war? 'I am conscious of nothing save physical discomfort and a deep desire for this damned nonsense to be over. Afterwards I can see the significance of events, but while they are happening I merely want to be out of them...'
It is Orwell's picture of the war on the Aragon front, and of war generally, which makes the strongest impression when reading Homage to Catalonia again today. Yet the book is not remembered for this, but rather for the events of May in Barcelona — the street fighting, the vilification and suppression of the POUM by the Communists — which opened Orwell's eyes to the methods of totalitarian government and set him on the course which he was to hold for the remainder of his short life.
Put rather too simply, the differences — which led to the May fighting — between the Communists/Socialists and the CNTFAI (Anarchists)/POUM related to the different emphasis which each side gave to the war and revolution. For the Communists it was winning the war which mattered first and, as Orwell later discovered, the aid which they got from Russia was conditional on their postponing the revolution. For the POUM 'war and revolution are inseparable'. When Orwell began to comprehend the divisions between the parties opposed to Franco he tended to support the Communist view — he wanted to get on with the war — and, on returning to Barcelona from the front, he considered transferring to the International Brigades.
But he stuck with the POUM, and within a few days the Communists were shooting at him across Las Ramblas. Later, after being wounded at the front near Huesca and having got his discharge from the militia, Orwell was lucky to escape from Spain. (Many of his comrades, including the slightly mysterious Belgian, Major Kopp, were arrested, kept in jail without trial, and shot.) By this time the POUM had been declared illegal and branded as a Fascist agency, not only in the Spanish press but also by the Daily Worker. After the war Orwell was to say, on more than one occasion, that he had exaggerated his sympathy for the POUM in Homage to Catalonia, but I think he protested too much. The book is no less honest for the fact that he told the story from the POUM side and was in a position to expose the lies and propaganda of the Communists. After all, he was about the only person to do so at the time (though Willy Brandt, who was in Barcelona as a correspondent for Norwegian newspapers, was also pro-POUM). Orwell is at pains to declare his interest, and is not uncritical of the POUM's policy.
Just before the 'May Days', Orwell was waiting for a new pair of boots to be made for him in Barcelona because the Spanish army had none to fit his size 12 feet. Had they been ready, and had his health not made it necessary for him to rest for a few days, he would probably have joined the International Brigades and left Catalonia before the fighting began. How fortunate it was that he stayed. 'History stopped in 1936', Orwell once said to Arthur Koestler, referring to the Civil War. It didn't, but it might have done; and we are grateful to Orwell for being there and doing what he did to help keep it going.
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