HELEN GRAHAM
George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is in all probability the most-read book in English about the Spanish Civil War of 1936–39. Its status rests in great part, perhaps overwhelmingly, on the compelling immediacy of the prose (its unadorned style would become Orwell’s trademark), and on the luminous humanity radiating through its pages. The book is a personal war diary, which Orwell composed in the months after his return from Spain in June 1937. The thirty-four-year-old was not yet the famed author of Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), but he had already staked his very writerly claim to make plain words count, and he went to Spain to find material he could transform into literature. But from the start he made the decision not only to write, but also to fight in Spain, for the beleaguered and internationally isolated Republic, and the promise of social equality it enshrined. He arrived in Barcelona in December 1936, five months into the war. The decision to head there rather than to Madrid was determined by the location of his political contacts. What Orwell saw in Barcelona led him to believe that he now had an opportunity to defend much more than a promise of future reform. The signs of dramatic change signalled to him that there was a social revolution in the making. Industry, along with much of the economic activity of the city, was under the control of the workers’ organizations whose street-fighting militia had defeated the army coup against the Republic the previous July. In nearby rural Aragón, the military front to which Orwell would soon be sent, agricultural collectives had been formed and villagers worked their land in common. But even more than these big shifts away from capitalist economic production, what really caught Orwell’s imagination and lit his hope was the feeling he got on Barcelona’s streets: of the chance to live differently, of how it might be for human beings to relate to each other on an equal and fraternal footing; the most famous words in Homage to Catalonia are these – ‘It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle’. Orwell notes how formal modes of address have been banished: ‘Nobody said “Señor” or “Don” or even “Usted ”; everyone called everyone else “Comrade” and “Thou”, and said “Salud! ” instead of “Buenos días” [ . . . ] All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.’
As the book unfolds it becomes clear that the homage of the title is above all to this feeling, to this possibility of equality. Orwell pays tribute to wartime Catalonia because for him it symbolizes those who were prepared to fight and die for it. This dream of equality and fraternity corresponded intimately with his own desire for a fairer world, one which could take the place of the class and caste systems everywhere burdening and belittling humanity. Orwell himself had been born into the relative material privilege of the English lower-middle classes, but his growing, prescient understanding of the psychological as well as physical destructiveness wrought by class and caste was in part filtered through his own experience of institutions designed to maintain their inequalities. First, the English public school system: Orwell was a scholarship boy at Wellington and Eton, where he conformed but was quietly – perhaps even deeply – unhappy. Then, as a young adult he was absorbed into the daily workings of British imperialism, when for a time he followed in the family tradition of Indian colonial service. What he witnessed changed him – perhaps, crucially, through the introspective exercise of writing about it – and he began to develop a critical stance. Soon, Orwell the political writer was making the link to the human devastation caused by the extreme inequality the class system perpetuated. In Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier he wrote about the social deprivation it visited on the poor of England. The emergence of George Orwell the writer-outsider, empathetic critic of inequality and soon a democratic socialist, was gradual, complex and in some ways contradictory. But his visceral opposition to hierarchizing systems was already clear, and burningly felt, before his arrival in Spain.
After cursory ‘military’ training in Barcelona – some antiquated drills and square-bashing at which Orwell, with his O.T.C. training from Eton and five years of colonial policing, looked askance – he was sent to the nearby Aragón front. It was a quiet front, far from the main fighting, and it would remain quiet for virtually the entire first year of the war, which is to say, for all the time Orwell was present on it. His dispatches from Aragón are nevertheless starkly memorable – of the harsh priorities imposed by trench warfare: ‘five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter [ . . . ] they were important in that order’; of war’s ubiquitous smell ‘of excrement and decaying food’ in that ‘bleak and chipped’ landscape; the painful ubiquity of lice and the sheer tedium of ‘no-war war’ in Aragón. But the human tenor is contrastingly warm: Orwell conveys the fine-grain, shows us how already, even in the quiet trenches of Aragón, the encounter with war was changing people forever. He views with affectionate exasperation the boys in his militia who have no clue about military discipline. Some of these boys were refugees, almost children. Others were lads from nearby villages for whom the paramount discipline was still agricultural labour, especially the harvest. They still thought nothing of temporarily leaving the trenches to attend to such tasks, and did not understand the wrath which descended on their return. Contrasting with this harsh learning curve, Orwell’s descriptions of Aragón also pick out the long continuities etched into its landscape: peasant candour and stoicism, their modes of dress and agricultural implements largely unchanged over decades, even hundreds of years. He is horrified by the evident hardship and inequality this continuity bespoke, but at the same time one senses its importance for Orwell: perhaps because through it Aragón was somehow allowing him to square the impossible circle of his radical politics and deep desire to preserve past ways of life. Orwell passionately wanted a world of freely cooperating, equal human beings, but he was also fiercely devoted to the memory of an idealized bucolic world, rooted in nostalgia for his own middle-class childhood in 1900s England, a ‘blue remembered’ paradise, before the endless rush of change, especially the suburbanizing kind which he hated. In Orwell’s mind’s eye, wartime Aragón became his nostalgic utopia because it seemed to allow revolutionary change and social continuity to coexist.
But the George Orwell who came to write up his personal war diary back in England in the latter months of 1937 already knew this circle was impossible to square, especially in Spain. The war was already changing everything and everyone. Across 1937, larger and larger numbers were being conscripted to the Republican army or as industrial war workers (including many young women from the cities and towns). Even when Orwell had first arrived in Barcelona in late 1936, the war elsewhere in Spain had already been escalating on vast battlefields around Madrid. And by the time he departed in summer 1937, high-tech war had exploded on the Northern Basque front. There, General Franco, courtesy of his Nazi and Fascist backers, bombed Guernica to oblivion. Spain’s larger war was not Orwell’s revolutionary utopia, it was a military nightmare dictated by the enemy. Not only were Hitler and Mussolini arming Franco to the hilt, but the democracies, headed up by Britain, were preventing the Republic from buying arms to defend itself. The war material the Republic could get on the black market (at astronomical cost), or sourced from the few countries prepared to help – including Mexico and the Soviet Union – was far too little, and also difficult to get into a virtually blockaded Republican Spain. To survive, the Republic had to fall back on its own resources, had to centralize, and indeed regiment both its military defence and its industrial war production. To do this, it had to mobilize a whole population in short order, many of whom were far from Catalonia and Aragón and did not want, or even understand, the revolution there.
These were some of the many ways in which the messiness of history and the challenges of an escalating war effort erupted into George Orwell’s cherished egalitarian dream. Writing in late 1937, he half recognizes this when he comments (but only in passing) on the Republic’s acute shortage of weapons, or, again in passing, anticipates the need to militarize: ‘The wretched children of my section could only be roused by dragging them out of their dug-outs feet foremost, and as soon as your back was turned they left their posts and slipped into shelter.’ By April 1937, a frustrated Orwell – ‘Any public school O.T.C. in England is far more like a modern army than we were’ – had been actively seeking transfer from Aragón to the already militarized front at Madrid, which would see heavy action again in July 1937. But first, after Orwell’s three-and-a-half months in the Aragón trenches, he was due leave, and so in late April he headed back to Barcelona. What happened there would dramatically change the course of his own war, and thus the book that would become Homage to Catalonia.
In Barcelona Orwell became caught up in what are known as the May Days – five days of intense street-fighting between Republican government forces and those who opposed the rolling-back of Catalonia’s decentralized, anticapitalist revolution. Support for the revolutionaries also came from Barcelona’s urban poor who had borne the brunt of the economic dislocation and hunger the war had caused. It was a violent confrontation, as well as a historically complex one, and it played out for high stakes. The central Republican government wanted to take direct control of Catalonia’s industry, now converted from textiles to war production. This was crucial as its main heavy industry in the north was about to fall into Franco’s hands, as his armies advanced on Bilbao. The government also wanted to secure control of agriculture in Aragón to feed its soldiers and cities – first and foremost Barcelona itself, for which Aragón was the crucial food-producing hinterland. (The Republic had most of Spain’s major urban populations, but Franco controlled the main crop-producing regions.) In the name of the war, then, in May 1937 the Republican government was prepared to destroy what remained of the collectivist revolution. It is also true that this revolution was not to the political taste of many in Republican Spain, but the war imperative was far from an excuse, given the desperate situation. Indeed, the government also thought that rolling back the revolution might mollify the British and French governments, whose support it still believed it could attract, not least to end the embargo on external arms purchase so hampering its ability to fight the war.
Orwell, when he was writing up Homage to Catalonia, certainly understood everything that was at stake here, indeed understood that Republican Spain was, at that point, Europe’s front line against Nazism. He would write as much, and more, in his 1943 essay ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’, which is included in this volume. But he also understood it already, by the time he went to Spain – indeed that was why he had gone in the first place, to fight Fascism. Yet in narrating the May Days in Homage to Catalonia he narrows the focus greatly and sticks entirely with his own ‘street view’ of events. He explains them as if they were exclusively about a sectarian political conflict of the Left, fought between Anarchists and Communists. Orwell himself took part on the side of a Left-wing party called the P.O.U.M., in whose militia he had fetched up in Aragón. P.O.U.M., largely a Catalan entity, and then in uneasy alliance with the large Anarchist organization C.N.T., was an outspoken opponent of militarization and supported the collectivist revolution at any price. Orwell’s disagreement with the P.O.U.M. on this is on record. But he would continue to defend the party throughout the May Days, and afterwards in Homage to Catalonia and elsewhere, because his sense of fairness was appalled by the lies being told about the P.O.U.M. in the pro-Soviet Communist press. P.O.U.M.’s ultra-revolutionary position was declared tantamount to Fascism, and it was accused of being covert supporters of Franco and Hitler. Orwell himself saw these accusations in English sources: he did not have enough Spanish or Catalan to read the Communist Party press in Spain. But similar accusations about the P.O.U.M. were made there, and the Communists in Spain and Catalonia were among the most vocal and aggressive (if far from the only) exponents of putting the war before the collectivist revolution. In the end, the street-fighting in Barcelona was put down by Republican government police drafted in from outside Catalonia. In the ensuing weeks, the atmosphere remained very tense in Catalonia, especially in Barcelona – there were arrests and some violent political reprisals. Orwell himself went into hiding before fleeing to France, for fear that he might be imprisoned, even killed, if he stayed. All of this makes the final part of the book a tense and gripping read, with many of the suspense elements of a political thriller.
Once back in England, George Orwell composed Homage to Catalonia under the immediate weight of shock and sadness deriving from his personal experience of the May Days. He devoted his formidable literary skill, the famous unadorned style notwithstanding, to making the book an elegy to a lost revolution – one he enshrined in the P.O.U.M., in an idealized Barcelona and in the young militia boys of the Aragón front. From time to time in the text, Orwell comments on the dilemmas of the wider war, but they are fragmentary remarks that lead nowhere, the ghosts of what might have been a different book: ‘It seemed dreadful that the defenders of the Republic should be this mob of ragged children carrying worn-out rifles which they did not know how to use.’ This ambivalence in Homage to Catalonia stands out particularly when it is read in conjunction with ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’. Even after writing the later essay, Orwell seems never to have proposed any qualitative revision to Homage to Catalonia – apart from a practical proposal (rarely implemented) to relocate to an appendix the two political commentary chapters (5 and 11), which can indeed be heavy going for a general reader.
None of this might have mattered, neither Orwell’s own ambivalence nor his lack of reflection on the wider Republican war effort, if Homage to Catalonia had been received by its readers as the personal war diary that it is. But Orwell died early, in 1950, just as the Cold War was intensifying. From that point on, his book would lead a long and fraught afterlife, often misused and misunderstood by purblind political commentators determined to prove that the immensely complicated world of wartime Republican Spain could be reduced to a Cold War parable of ‘Communist control’, or even more ahistorically, to ‘Soviet control of the Spanish Republic’. In some ways, too, Orwell’s own account of the May Days lends itself to such a misinterpretation – by what he left out or was silent on, as well as by what he simply could not have been expected to know or understand from his street, or rooftop, view (Orwell spent some time on lookout duty on the roof of a cinema overlooking the P.O.U.M. headquarters, which he atmospherically describes in chapter 10).
But if in 2021 we return to consider Homage to Catalonia as his personal diary of the war, then we can see that its paradoxes and contradictions are the same ones at the heart of all George Orwell’s work. The great wartime prime minister of the Spanish Republic, Juan Negrín, who met Orwell for the first time in 1940 in London, would later describe him, perceptively and not unkindly, as incarnating the spirit of Don Quixote. It was that idealism in Orwell which transformed Homage to Catalonia into something other than political reportage: for in it Orwell filters his experience in Spain through his own past, through his cumulative hopes and desires. Orwell insists on the possibility of realizing a dream, against the hell and high water of history. And in Homage to Catalonia he does so with all the beauty and persuasiveness of his legendarily ‘plain’ prose (which is to say not plain or simple at all). Over the years, the impact of his book has posed problems for jobbing historians of the war in Spain. But for many readers what matters more is Orwell’s gift for articulating hope – a hope which also enables us to rethink for new times why collective struggle for a fairer world is still worth the candle. Probably very few people who read Homage to Catalonia ever forget Orwell’s evocation of the unknown Italian militia volunteer he encountered before the struggle – when they’d shaken hands in the barracks in Barcelona (‘I never saw [him] again. It can be taken as quite certain that he is dead’). Orwell begins Homage to Catalonia and ends ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ in memory of this volunteer, a migrant or political refugee, quite likely both: ‘When I remember – oh, how vividly! – his shabby uniform and fierce, pathetic, innocent face, the complex side-issues of the war seem to fade away and I see clearly that there was at any rate no doubt as to who was in the right [ . . . ] The question is very simple. Shall people like that Italian soldier be allowed to live the decent, fully human life which is now technically achievable, or shan’t they? [ . . . ] I want it to be sooner and not later – some time within the next hundred years, say, and not some time within the next ten thousand years. That was the real issue of the Spanish war, and of the last war, and perhaps of other wars yet to come.’