HE TRAVELED BY TRAIN at first, but soon traveled on foot or in crowded public buses, means of transportation that brought him closer to the unemployed. Orwell kept careful notes as he traveled north, taking in not only attitude and opinion, but being diligent about collecting facts with which to support his writing. He slept in lodging houses—barely a step up from the rooms he’d taken in Paris or the poor sections of London. Orwell seemed determined at first to find as much filth as he could. He would claim later that he tolerated the dirt and odor well enough, until he sat at the breakfast table one morning and discovered a full chamber pot under the table near his chair. He took to staying with the unemployed workers, in their own homes, which he found to be quite clean. It was a matter of pride to many of the unemployed that while there might be no income, there would be no squalor. By February 1936 Orwell was in Manchester, ready to begin his work.
Orwell had been provided with a number of contacts in the area, and had letters of introduction from mutual acquaintances in London. He called first upon the man who supervised the printing of the Adelphi, and who was an insightful and influential local labor leader. Through talking with him, Orwell could begin sorting out the various political and social factions seeking the support of the unemployed. There seemed to be dozens of such groups, some large, some small, all vocal. Their anger was directed at a government that had failed in its responsibilities to the unemployed, although the groups differed as to what those responsibilities were, and how they should be carried out. What they did agree upon was that the attempts made so far to deal with relief for the unemployed had either been ill-considered or incompetent. Change was demanded.
But whose change? Among the most influential of the political groups was the Independent Labour Party (ILP), which had been founded in 1893 and had developed close ties with labor unions. The ILP had broken with the politically established Labour Party in 1932. The ILP had never been so rarefied an intellectual body as the contemporaneous Fabian Society, which boasted among its membership at various times George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and other leading left-wing thinkers and writers. In fact, much of the ILP’s intellectual core had refused to join in the split from the Labour Party and had formed another organization, the Socialist League. The ILP might lack a large intellectual core, but it attracted the attention of many working men and women, and it was not without an interest in ideas: theories of reform were as frequent a topic as unemployment statistics.
Also making its presence known in industrially depressed areas was the Communist Party, increasingly loud and exhortatory, but whose actual hold over the workers was difficult for Orwell to gauge. The National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM) had been formed to give an additional voice to those out of work. (The unions whose members were joining NUWM objected to it, perhaps fearing it would weaken them.) Communist influence in the administration of NUWM was strong. Some right-wing commentators said that it was a communist organization. National Unemployed Workers’ Movement members staged hunger marches on London in an attempt to demonstrate not only the plight of the unemployed, but also their comradeship.
As is customary during hard times, churches also became more active, some of them growing political, others remaining sure that faith alone would provide an answer. The more energetic churchmen campaigned as vigorously for members as did the political organizations.
Orwell soon discovered that many of the workers he met belonged to more than one organization. If there was an overlap among the groups, there was also great disagreement among them, with no two alike in their prescriptions for Britain’s ills. It was not enough simply to be left wing. Questions arose: Left of what? How far left? More left than what? But disgust, anger, and disappointment were emotions that everyone agreed upon. Political speakers shouted that theirs was the voice of the majority, but their shouts were never echoed by a majority’s cheers.
It was recommended to Orwell that he travel farther north, to Wigan in the coal-mining heart of Lancashire, close to Manchester. He made the trip to Wigan, aware that he could be perceived as merely another middle-class Londoner, wearing studiously baggy clothes, come to talk about his solidarity with the lower classes. There were many such people about, well-dressed and articulate socialists who harangued the workers with the need for social change and then, their socialist duty done, retired to comfortable quarters and full plates, leaving their audiences to be nourished by ideas. Orwell managed to convince most of those he met of his own sincerity, although his determination to stay occasionally in quarters few workers would visit gave some of the people he interviewed a bit of concern. It would not do for him to show workers living with slop jars by their feet as they ate.
In Wigan, Orwell observed the workers close up, watching as they met and argued politics, speaking with their wives about domestic conditions, asking questions, taking notes. Trains bearing mountainous loads of refuse and dirt often passed through Wigan, and the unemployed workers leaped onto the cars, shovels in hand, pushing heaps of trash onto the sides of the tracks in hopes of finding a lump or two of coal among the debris. They had no food, they had no heat, they had little hope.
Orwell spent a good deal of his time in the Wigan library, a gathering place for many workers. As Orwell proceeded diligently to unearth facts and figures for his book, he became aware that the people in the library were not there in search of education or information. It was a public building open to them and it was warm. Their anger seethed, but with many it did little good to talk about the future: how could one worry about the future when uncertain of how to get through a single day? Orwell continued to make notes.
Late in February Orwell took his first journey down into a coal mine. He wanted to witness firsthand the conditions endured by those still employed. He traveled nine hundred feet down into cramped tunnels. His height was a problem. Even men of average height had to stoop as they made their way through the mines; Orwell found himself bent nearly double for long hours. He cracked his head repeatedly on the timbers with which the mine was shored up. It was a filthy, dark, claustrophobic world, as empty of hope in its own way as was the world of the unemployed above.
By March 1936, the expedition to Wigan had taken its toll on Orwell’s health. He went to Liverpool, but his strength gave out there, and he was cared for by a socialist couple to whom he presented a letter of introduction even as he collapsed. He remained in bed for only a few days, however, rising to go to Sheffield for an examination of the conditions there. Sheffield was in coal-mining territory, but its industrial base was more diversified than that of Wigan. Textile and other unemployed factory workers were little different from shipyard workers or miners. They had all experienced the theft of their future, and more than a few felt that a new future must be created from political and social revolution. Reform was not enough.
Orwell stayed in Sheffield with a communist whose works had appeared occasionally in the Adelphi, but who was now too caught up in the idea of communism and Marxist theory to write. Orwell listened patiently as the wonders of Marxism were explained, and endured a bit of jibing about his own middle-class background. He left Sheffield soon to revisit his own family, staying for a time with his sister Marjorie and her husband, first in their home in Bristol, then briefly at their country cottage. When he left Marjorie he returned to the mines again, but this time he was better prepared. He visited newer mines as well, better lighted, seemingly safer than the older ones. The system, though, that operated those mines, and condemned men to a life in them, continued to prey upon Orwell’s thoughts. He began seeking in earnest for a form for his book.
His journey to the north was nearly over. Orwell had begun the trip as a writer on assignment, a novelist taking a journalistic sabbatical. He had carried with him the galleys of Keep the Aspidistra Flying, and, early on in his trip, would spend evenings going over the novel after a long day of social and political investigation. The novel had been altered somewhat because Gollancz again feared a libel suit. But the changes bothered Orwell less than the narrowness of the book’s point of view. Gordon Comstock was no artist, no revolutionary, no thinker. He was of the middle class and only pretended to those things; the same charges had been leveled at his creator by unemployed people and by working-class political activists. Orwell returned the corrected proofs to Gollancz, but he was enormously dissatisfied with the novel, both as a piece of art and as a piece of politics. He’d turned inward too long, concentrating on character rather than culture, psychology rather than society. He would change that with the new book, if he could find the right approach to his materials.
Before returning home he attended another political gathering. Orwell had listened to communists, to socialists, to ministers of various religions, to the ILP, the NUWM, to organizations whose names were not worth noting. In mid-March he attended a rally held by Oswald Mosley, who’d broken with the Labour Party at the beginning of the 1930s and had formed an organization called the British Union of Fascists. Mosley’s followers wore black shirts as symbols of their fascism, and cheered their leader as he called for a revolution of his own. Those in the audience who dissented were beaten. It was not only the left that sought support in those trying times.
By April 1936, Orwell was finished and returned to the south. Although he went briefly to London, he had no intention of staying there, or in any city. He had had enough of cities. Cities and their demands—for food, for fuel, for raw materials—had played too large a part in creating the problem’s he’d just seen. Orwell was ready to move to the country, and to settle there with Eileen if he could find a place they could afford. He wanted the tranquility of rural life as he thought and worked his way through the political ideas that would form the heart of the book Gollancz had commissioned. Through friends he heard of a likely spot, Wallington, and he traveled there to see the house they had found.
Wallington, with barely two hundred people, sounded like the sort of village he’d hoped for, the sort in which, had his choices been different, he might have become a vicar and led a quiet, perhaps scholarly life. He left the main highway between London and Cambridge and still had a few miles of narrow lanes to cover before he found the house he was to rent. It had once been a crossroads store, he knew, and one of its appeals was the thought of reopening the store for business and perhaps generating a bit of extra income. He had been told that the house was small.
When he finally arrived in Wallington, Orwell was enchanted to discover just how small the house really was. A child would not have thought it large. The Stores, as it was called, was not quite two dozen feet long, less than half that wide. There were two rooms on the ground floor, each eleven by eleven feet, a tiny kitchen, and two bedrooms upstairs. The Stores was almost too small even to be called a cottage, and Orwell banged his head on the low ceilings. He had stayed in lodging houses where the rooms were larger. But The Stores was no lodging, it was a home, and its small size gave him a sense of security, not claustrophobia. He signed a lease for the house and immediately set to work clearing a garden and building a chicken house. If he was going to live in the country, he was going to raise vegetables and keep animals. He pruned the fruit trees, and soon had chickens, geese, and goats to keep him company.
Eileen would be with him before the summer ended: they planned to marry in early June. First, Orwell had to prepare The Stores for occupancy, as well as do the preparatory work required for his new book. Keep the Aspidistra Flying was published on April 20, 1936, in an edition of 3,000 copies; it did not find an American publisher, and the British edition sold only moderately. He told any who inquired that he did not care for the novel, and that he was taking a break from novel writing. He felt his novels to be too shallow, lacking commitment, or insight, or something. It was the writer’s responsibility, Orwell felt with increasing passion, to use his abilities to tell the truth. He had tried throughout his career to do that, but after Wigan he realized that narrow novelistic truth was no longer sufficient for his purposes or ambitions. He was looking for more.
Although temporarily off novels, Orwell returned to the essay in late May at the request of the editor of New Writing. With all the details of The Stores to attend to, the looming marriage, the new book, Orwell felt obliged to describe the planned piece first, in a letter, as a way of determining editorial interest. The editor encouraged Orwell to proceed with the essay, one of his reminiscences of Burma, an account of the execution of an elephant.
An elephant had gone on a rampage and killed a Burmese. Orwell, as he re-created the story in the essay, was summoned to kill the elephant. But the rampage was ended, the animal docile. Orwell decided not to kill it. A crowd of Burmese had gathered, though, staring at the young police officer in his uniform. The situation, as recalled in the essay, became more clear.
“And suddenly I realised that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.”
He understood that if he did not kill the elephant he would be laughed at, and from the vantage point of his typewriter he understood that the one thing tyrants can never endure is being laughed at. The elephant fell to the young officer’s gun, and the young officer avoided the overwhelming catastrophe of appearing foolish before the empire’s subjects. Orwell called the piece “Shooting an Elephant” and it appeared in the fall of 1936.
His experiences in Burma were one thing to write about: they had been filtered now through a decade of experience and hindsight. In “Shooting an Elephant” Orwell wrote as a mature man, his insights fully formed. The experiences in the industrial north, in Wigan and Sheffield, were more difficult to put into words. They were too fresh. Orwell had written his notes up once as a diary, but he remained dissatisfied. There was politics in the story he had been assigned to write, and facts and figures to document the politics, but there was also human drama; there were ideas, but there were also emotions to be described. He had to make readers feel the drama if he was to persuade them of the politics.
In June, as he worked and reworked the opening portions of his manuscript, Orwell married Eileen O’Shaughnessy, bringing a certain order to his domestic life at least. The wedding was small and took place on June 9, 1936. Before the ceremony Eileen was drawn aside by both Ida and Avril Blair, and advised that she was entering into marriage with a man of limited responsibility. Eileen did not mind, and did not particularly believe the criticism. Orwell knew his family considered him eccentric. The couple settled into The Stores, and soon established a comfortable and productive routine. Eileen was by no means a quiet and traditional homemaker—her political attitudes differed in some particulars from her husband’s, and she did not shrink from giving him fiery argument. However, she rose early to prepare a large breakfast for the two of them. She told her friends that if she did not attend to such details Orwell would simply forget to eat, spending all of his time sitting at the typewriter, smoking cigarettes, and drinking strong tea.
Most of Orwell’s time that summer of 1936 was spent at his machine, or working on The Stores. The garden had fallen into disrepair, it was thick with weeds, but Orwell continued to work daily at clearing it. He and Eileen began learning the intricacies of operating their small shop, attempting to gauge the market for different products, remaining alert to inventory, keeping the books. Most of their customers were children, spending their pennies on candy. Orwell and Eileen had discussed having children of their own, but by their first anniversary it became clear that conception would not come easily, if at all. They spoke of the possibility of adoption, but decided to wait. Perhaps the problem was a temporary one.
Occasionally friends would make the journey from London to visit the couple in their tiny cottage. The ILP offered a series of summer lectures, a sort of political school, in nearby Letchworth, and Orwell attended several sessions there, arguing dogma with other left-wing political writers and activists. He gave several lectures himself that summer, and in book reviews increasingly focused upon political themes. His Wigan book was at last beginning to take shape, and as it did Orwell’s political thoughts grew more clear. He enjoyed a correspondence with the American novelist Henry Miller, whose Tropic of Cancer had broken ground in its frank presentation of sexuality and natural life. Miller, who greatly admired the honesty and clarity of Orwell’s work, advised him to abandon politics as a theme and more fully embrace life itself. But Orwell was lost in politics and would not listen.
As his book on British unemployment and politics took shape, Orwell’s attention was split. He argued in his book that a political revolution would be required in Britain before there was any sort of economic justice, but as his book neared its second half he began to realize that none of the factions seeking the support of the unemployed were adequate to the task of reforming the economic situation. The ILP, the NUWM, the communists, the socialists—each group was so caught up in the details of its own dogma and internal debate that it lost sight of the purposes to which it supposedly devoted itself. Some leaders became obsessed with power for its own sake, others—especially the socialists—cost themselves support by their own eccentricity. “. . . there is the horrible—the really disquieting—prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words Socialism and Communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature Cure quack, pacifist and feminist in England.” Orwell painted a portrait of socialism as the commonsense solution to Britain’s problems, but also an acid picture of socialists, mostly from the middle classes, whose interest in the political movement was prompted either by eccentricity or, oddly, by their own sense of “social prestige.” His prose was clear and his arguments well made, but even as he wrote he knew that Victor Gollancz would not be pleased with the book produced as a result of his assignment.
While taking British socialists to task, Orwell was captivated by the socialist movement under way in Spain. By late in the summer of 1936, Spain was divided into armed camps, workers with weapons attempting to fight back against the military’s seizure of the Spanish government. The battle lines in Spain were political as well as geographic and strategic: the left, with communists, socialists, and a variety of revolutionaries fighting side by side against the fascists. Left-wing thinkers around the world began to rally to the cause of the Spanish left, and volunteers from many different countries traveled to Spain. The fascists, led by Francisco Franco, had begun receiving the support of the German leader, Adolf Hitler, and the Italian leader, Benito Mussolini. Orwell himself gave thought to traveling to Spain, to put his life on the line where before he had only put words. In Spain there was a war going on for control of a nation.
Words were his occupation, however, and throughout the fall as Spain’s conflict grew increasingly bloody, Orwell labored to complete his manuscript. He called the book The Road to Wigan Pier, taking its title from his attempt to visit a famous pier, only to find that it was long destroyed. The book’s final shape, divided into two parts of roughly equal size, prompted Gollancz to suggest separate publication of the halves. The first half, a documentary of Orwell’s journey, was a gray and moving portrait of the despair of the unemployed, beginning with a horrifying scene of degradation. It was the sort of book Orwell was known for, supported with facts and figures as well as anecdotes and incidents.
It was The Road to Wigan Pier’s second half that proved problematical to Gollancz, as Orwell had anticipated. Gollancz had his reputation as a left-wing thinker and publisher to consider, and Orwell’s criticisms of the people on the left were too acute, too offensive. Orwell, though, would not permit the book to be divided. He stood by what he wrote, and in late 1936 Gollancz resigned himself to publishing the book as a whole. It would be a unique whole, however, for Gollancz felt impelled to write a long introduction to Orwell’s text. This apologia made clear Gollancz’s admiration for the first half of the book, but made clear also that the publisher felt the second half to be the work of a man as eccentric as the socialist characters pictured in the book. Certainly Orwell was sincere, Gollancz felt, but he was also naive and politically unschooled; Orwell’s portrait of Soviet communism as being equally rapacious and mechanical as the worst of capitalism, was, according to Gollancz, simply wrong.
Despite his reservations, Gollancz made The Road to Wigan Pier a major offering of his firm’s Left Book Club, and quickly sold more than 40,000 copies, with a second and then a third printing ordered. The trade edition appeared in March 1937, and sold fewer than 2,000 copies. And, to get at least a bit more of his own way, Gollancz also published a separate edition of the first section of the book, recommending that activists on the left use it as a means of recruiting more people to their cause.
By the time The Road to Wigan Pier was published, its author had been in Spain for three months. He’d made up his mind to join the fight, and by winter 1936 his plans were taking shape. As was Orwell’s custom, he obtained letters of introduction to people whom it might be valuable to know. He helped Eileen prepare The Stores for operation without him. He dealt with a variety of literary details, and by December was on his way to the Spanish front. He stopped briefly in Paris and visited Henry Miller, who remained convinced that Orwell was risking his life for no good reason, but nonetheless provided him with a warm corduroy coat. The day after Christmas 1936, George Orwell arrived in Barcelona.
Britain’s industrial north had impressed Orwell with its widespread despair, but Barcelona was alive with the unity of spirit that, he’d always known, would accompany true revolution. Everyone was an equal, a comrade. The workers ran every aspect of the city; even barbers spoke of revolution as they clipped hair. This was the future, the way things should be, like-minded people standing shoulder to shoulder. They might be undersupplied and underfed, but they were equals facing up to the threat of fascism. Orwell had told his friends that he was going to Spain as a journalist, but once he arrived he knew that he would have to fight. He had been an observer too long, he wanted now to share the struggle.
He made his way to the Barcelona office of the ILP and presented his letters of introduction. It did not take long for Orwell to learn that, despite the surface appearance of unity of purpose, Spain’s noble resistance was as segmented and factionalized as the left wing in Britain. The ILP supported the United Marxist Workers’ Party, called POUM after its Spanish initials (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista), a group that fielded a militia and fought bravely against the fascists. But the POUM was viewed with some suspicion by the communists, whose support went to the Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), a Spanish trade union organization. The Soviet Union was providing arms, equipment, and financial aid to the Spanish revolutionaries, but was also wary of the POUM. The communists considered the POUM dangerously allied to Lev Davidovich Trotsky, who had been expelled from the Soviet communist party and deported from Russia in the late 1920s. Trotsky’s fall had resulted from the same sort of party fragmentation that Orwell began to perceive in Spain. Soviet Marxists wanted their revolution their way and would tolerate no deviation from the principles of communism as they saw them. Trotskyite sympathizers were seen as traitors to the cause, and in Spain there was a gathering tension between the groups.
Political sensibilities and sympathies aside, Orwell brought one skill to Spain that earned him a warm welcome: he could, as a result of his training in Burma, handle a rifle. For a group of revolutionaries involved in a desperate war there was, to Orwell, a shocking lack of military experience, skill, and discipline. He enlisted almost upon arrival in the POUM militia, was issued one of the few rifles available, and set to work as a drill instructor, seeking to instill some sense of military efficiency and order in the men with whom he served. It was not easy. Orwell’s rifle was older than the century, and it was virtually the only weapon among a training group of fifty men. Orwell patiently showed the others how to break down the rifle, clean it, and reassemble it. They practiced firing the rifle, but not often, for there was little ammunition, and frequently it was the wrong size. For their part, the militiamen endeavored to get Orwell drunk. They failed, and he was accepted as a comrade in arms. The speed with which he mastered Spanish also impressed them.
Early in 1937 Orwell traveled to the front, joining PODM militiamen in Catalonia in northeast Spain. He encamped with young Spanish union workers and several dozen British volunteers who had joined through the ILP. Orwell at thirty-three was older than many of the Spanish, and he brought a certain commonsense approach to the business of war. At the time, fighting was sporadic in Catalonia, with most of the conflict consisting of sniper duels. When food was in short supply Orwell would find the nearest source, in more than one case a field of potatoes. He would measure the distance between the field and the nearest fascist emplacement and calculate the range of the enemy weapons. If their weapons lacked the range needed to hit him, he would calmly set forth for the harvest while his companions urged him to behave more sensibly. Orwell maintained that his behavior was above all sensible, and they all dined on fresh potatoes. The other members of the militia marveled at his coolness almost as much as they marveled at the sight of his feet: some claimed that Orwell’s boots were the largest they had ever seen.
He settled into the routine of war easily, keeping mainly to himself, writing letters to Eileen, joining in the infrequent action. Orwell developed a more clear understanding of the PODM position, sympathizing with PODM members over their opposition to the centralization that was a hallmark of Soviet communism. The PODM argued with increasing fire that the Spanish Civil War should be seized as an opportunity for a workers’ revolt, that it was a war of true revolution as well as a war against the fascists. The results of such a revolution would be not only the defeat of fascism, but also the creation of a new form of government, a more equitable form, for all of Spain. The communists, increasingly influenced by Stalin and advisers from Russia, disagreed: the war was against fascism alone. Once won, said the communists, the central government would be restored, doubtless with a strong Stalinist slant. As spring deepened, so did the sense of distrust between the two factions.
Eileen arrived in Spain in February, bringing cigars and other items for her husband. They managed to meet occasionally throughout the spring, and Orwell revealed that he was giving some thought to leaving the POUM and joining the more closely communist-affiliated International Brigade in Madrid. Perhaps he wanted to spend time with the other side, having absorbed the arguments of the POUM members and the anarchists. But this shift was not to be. By May the tension between the POUM and the communists erupted into a bloody conflict, a civil war within a civil war. The communists charged that the POUM was operating under false pretenses, that it was actually composed of fascists, and that it received aid and equipment from the fascists. The communist propaganda machine unleashed its efforts to brand all of the noncommunist revolutionaries in Spain as tools of the Germans and the Italians, betrayers of the Marxist cause. The power of print became clear to Orwell: what the communists wrote appeared in black and white and it mattered little that none of it was true. It was in print and it sounded like the truth, and to many readers it simply became the truth. Barricades sprouted throughout Barcelona, windows were shuttered, gunfire was exchanged between former comrades: hundreds died, more than a thousand were wounded.
Late in May, bitter at the turn of events, Orwell returned to the front to serve as an officer with an ILP unit in the trenches. Orwell was taller than the trenches were deep, but his disregard for danger, along with his dislike for bending over or crouching, kept his head high above the lip of the trench. He was standing tall, telling stories, early on the morning of May 20 when a sniper’s bullet finally found him, entering his throat below the larynx and passing out the back.
The bullet had found Orwell but it had fortunately missed his spinal cord. He was lucky as well that the fascists possessed more modern weapons than the revolutionaries. The high speed of the modern rifle with which he was shot served to generate great heat, which sealed the wound as the bullet passed through. It looked for a while, though, as if he would die, and at best that he would never speak again. He was transferred from a field hospital to a more modern facility, and then to Barcelona. Eileen joined him, staying by his side as he regained his strength, and more slowly, the use of his voice. His speech was hoarse, his voice lower than it had been, but he was gradually able to form words, to make himself understood. He lay in his hospital bed alongside other wounded volunteers, and in early June he returned to the front and requested a medical discharge from the militia. The discharge was approved, and by the middle of the month Orwell was on his way to Barcelona, where he would rejoin Eileen and make his way back to Britain.
The conflict between the communists and the POUM had changed its tenor as Orwell recuperated. The initial round of fighting between the groups had ended, and the communists, through the police they controlled, had begun a purge of the revolutionaries, arresting as many of them as they could find. Membership in the POUM, the ILP, or the Anarchist Party was now a criminal offense. Men beside whom Orwell had fought for a cause were now jailed with little pretense of due process, and Spaniards and foreign volunteers alike were locked up indiscriminately. Eileen had been confronted one night by a police contingent come without warning to search her hotel room. She had managed to hide the incriminating documents she carried, and when Orwell arrived in Barcelona she advised him to go into hiding as well. He slept with other fugitives in shattered buildings, still weak from his wounds but strengthened by the bitterness that flowed through him. This was no revolution. It was a situation as totalitarian in its denial of any freedom of dissent as that of the fascists. Late in June he and Eileen made their way into France, fearing that at any moment they, too, would be rounded up.
Despite his wound, despite the paranoia which had drained him and Eileen as they escaped from Spain, despite his exhaustion, Orwell could not wait to get to his typewriter. If the communists could use words, so could he. He barely took the time to catch his breath after arriving at The Stores in early July before sitting at his desk and beginning work on a long article about the Spanish dilemma. He had cabled from France a description of the article to the editor of New English Weekly; the request for the piece was at The Stores waiting for him. Orwell called the article “Spilling the Spanish Beans” and despite the speed of its composition it was clearly written. Orwell’s anger was held in check: it would do no good to froth at the mouth, or on the page. He sought to tell the truth as he had seen it, and he made obvious from his opening paragraphs that there was a reign of terror taking place in Spain at the communists’ direction. He also emphasized that the communist press was manipulating the world’s left-wing readers, using their fear of fascism as a means of distracting them from the horrors the communists themselves were committing.
The piece was rejected by the editor who had requested it. Once again Orwell discovered the difficulty involved in saying anything critical of the communists in Britain’s left-wing press. “Spilling the Spanish Beans” eventually found a magazine willing to print it, but throughout the late summer of 1937 Orwell found his writings about Spain going homeless. Book reviews were rejected on the grounds that they disagreed too overtly with the positions presented by the communists, not because what Orwell said was untrue. Orwell continued to write, launching himself into a book-length treatment of Spain even as his shorter pieces were, if not suppressed, at least ignored. He also found himself under attack for the views expressed in The Road to Wigan Pier, with the British communist reviewers particularly harsh in their criticisms. They branded him a snob, a middle-class writer whose contempt for the poor and their smells, they claimed, showed through on every page. Orwell remained at The Stores, helping Eileen with the management of the shop and the garden, but spending most of his time at the typewriter, building a portrait of the Spanish Civil War and the part he had played in it.
He completed the new book early in 1938. Orwell experienced none of the difficulties of composition with Homage to Catalonia, as he called the new manuscript, that he had with The Road to Wigan Pier. In the earlier book he had attempted to describe the perils of factionalism among the left; now he wrote of the consequences of those perils. He realized that the communists could be even more extreme in their actions than the fascists—more totalitarian, more fearful of any original thought, more willing to go to any extreme to crush dissidents and revolutionaries. Theirs were crimes of calculation, but according to Orwell the left in Britain shared complicity because they simply ignored the communist purges. If Orwell needed further evidence he had received it early in the book’s composition, when Gollancz suggested, before Orwell was more than a few pages into the manuscript, that Orwell should take it to another publisher. The communists labeled the POUM fascists, and as a publisher Gollancz would have nothing to do with a book that dealt favorably with fascists.
Orwell’s new publishers, Seeker and Warburg, proved more than willing to let Orwell express his own views. Fredric Warburg, one of the company’s principals, was closely allied to the ILP, and other ILP members were constantly requesting that Orwell join their cause. As publication of his new book neared, Orwell found himself increasingly drawn to the ILP. He still had some hope that in Britain at least independent socialist organizations such as the ILP could bring about a revolution and avoid the terrible pogroms that accompanied communist takeovers. His hope, though, was tempered by his common sense and his understanding of political reality. Homage to Catalonia presented the story of revolutionary ideals compromised and finally crushed or consumed by the forces that dwelled within the revolutionaries themselves. Orwell had concluded the book with an account of his and Eileen’s flight from Spain, building to a final paragraph in which he returned to the land of his birth. The British seemed so removed from everything.
“Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday. The industrial towns were far away, a smudge of smoke and misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”
Orwell knew what was coming, had seen in Spain only a rehearsal for the conflagration that would envelop the world before too many more years had passed. He had experienced and been outraged by the subversion of principle to the ends of political expediency, and had come to view Soviet communism as an evil growth against which people of integrity must stand up. His revulsion did not drive him back to capitalism; Orwell returned from Spain more completely committed to socialism than ever. In Spain he had also seen the face of war, had been wounded himself, and lain with the wounded. He had also killed, but at a distance, with hand grenades. In Homage to Catalonia he told a story of once getting a fascist soldier in the sights of his rifle, only to realize that the enemy had his pants around his ankles and was involved with a simple, universal, nonpolitical need. He brought home with him the truth that people going to the bathroom were not the enemy, but only people, as well as the truth that not every ally should be openly embraced. Homage to Catalonia was in many ways Orwell’s first great book: he had arrived at a complex political position, but had learned to express that position with clarity and simplicity. Soon, he knew, bombs would rain on everyone, and everyone would be politicized. But everyone would also be, simultaneously, in the position of the fascist Orwell had been unable to shoot: common people, neither good nor bad, placed in situations of danger and subject to manipulation. His account of Spain was his sixth book, but he felt himself only just beginning to get to work.