[3–6 August 1937] Typewritten copy
In June 1937, Left Review solicited reactions of writers to the Spanish Civil War. A questionnaire, prefaced by an appeal to writers to take sides, ‘For it is impossible any longer to take no side’, was sent out by Nancy Cunard. 1 The appeal was issued over the names of twelve writers, who included Louis Aragon, W. H. Auden, Heinrich Mann, Ivor Montagu, Stephen Spender, Tristan Tzara and Nancy Cunard (who processed the replies). Lawrence & Wishart published the result as a pamphlet, Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, in December 1937. Authors were asked, ‘Are you for, or against, the legal Government and People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?’ Authors were asked to answer in half a dozen lines. Although many wrote briefly (Samuel Beckett especially so, turning three words into one: ‘¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!’, and Rose Macaulay in two words, ‘AGAINST FRANCO’), many wrote more fully. Orwell’s letter to Nancy Cunard was believed to have been lost. On 18 March 1994, the New Statesman published an article by Andy Croft, ‘The Awkward Squaddie’, which included part of Orwell’s reply to Nancy Cunard; it had been written on the back of the appeal. She typed a copy (or had a copy typed) of Orwell’s reply and sent it to the editor of Left Review, Randall Swingler, among whose papers it was found by Andy Croft, together with a covering letter from Nancy Cunard to Swingler. The copy of Orwell’s letter is headed ‘Letter received, addressed to me, at Paris address, Aug 6. 1937’; it is not clear whether the 6 August is the date Orwell sent his letter or the date of its receipt. In his article, Croft correctly sets the context of this letter between the publication of the two parts of ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’, 29 July and 2 September 1937 (see above). But there is a more specific, and more significant, context, revealed by the letters published here. Orwell was desperately anxious about the fate of his former colleagues rotting in jails in Spain as a result of the ‘reign of terror’ to which he refers in his letter to Nancy Cunard. For a much fuller note see XI/386A.
Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and Spender, I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet-hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody. Moreover, I know what is happening and has been happening on the Government side for months past, i.e. that Fascism is being riveted on the Spanish workers under the pretext of resisting Fascism; also that since May a reign of terror has been proceeding and all the jails and any place that will serve as a jail are crammed with prisoners who are not only imprisoned without trial but are half-starved, beaten and insulted. I dare say you know it too, though God knows anyone who could write the stuff overleaf would be fool enough to believe anything, even the war-news in the Daily Worker. But the chances are that you – whoever you are who keep sending me this thing – have money and are well-informed; so no doubt you know something about the inner history of the war and have deliberately joined in the defence of ‘democracy’ (i.e. capitalism) racket in order to aid in crushing the Spanish working class and thus indirectly defend your dirty little dividends.
This is more than 6 lines, but if I did compress what I know and think about the Spanish War into 6 lines you wouldn’t print it. You wouldn’t have the guts.
By the way, tell your pansy friend Spender2 that I am preserving specimens of his war-heroics and that when the time comes when he squirms for shame at having written it, as the people who wrote the war-propaganda in the Great War are squirming now, I shall rub it in good and hard.
1. Nancy Cunard (1896–1965) was the daughter of the wealthy shipping magnate who gave his name to the Cunard line; hence the reference in Orwell’s letter to her of defending ‘your dirty little dividends’. She wrote poetry and literary reminiscences and devoted herself to socialist issues and the cause and arts of the blacks.
2. Stephen Spender (1909–95; Kt., 1993), poet, novelist, dramatist, critic and translator. He edited Horizon with Cyril Connolly, 1940–41, and was a co-editor of Encounter, 1953–65, remaining on the editorial board until 1967, when it was discovered that some of the money to launch Encounter had been provided by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Orwell counted Spender among parlour Bolsheviks and ‘fashionable successful persons’, whom he castigated from time to time, see Crick, 351. They later became friends and, on 15? April 1938, Orwell wrote Spender an explanation of how he changed his attitude after meeting him (435).