Homage to Truth

Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's account of his experiences as a volunteer on the republican side during the Spanish Civil War. But it's not just another memoir. No, it's far more. For it marks a decisive stage in his progress as a writer and a thinker. Indeed, if one wanted to understand the roots behind the major themes in both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four this book is essential reading.

Orwell, who had developed a general but rather unfocused sympathy for socialism, came to Spain to fight against 'fascism' without any particular idea of what he was fighting for. Like the majority of the foreign volunteers he was likely to have ended up serving with the International Brigades, controlled by the communists and ultimately directed by the Comintern in Moscow. But he did not. Quite by chance he enrolled in the militia of the Partido Obrero Unificación Marxista or POUM, a local Marxist and anti-Stalinist movement set up by one Andrés Nin, a former associate of Leon Trotsky. Yes, it was by chance, but politically and intellectually it was a decisive step in turning Eric Blair, the author's real name, into the mature George Orwell.

The Spanish Civil War was a struggle between the left and the right, between progress and reaction, between enlightenment and oppression. Well, no, it was far more complex than that. In 1937 on the republican side the struggle had become a war within a war, as Stalin decided to suppress all of the non-communist factions on the side of the government. This was the time of the Great Purge, of the Moscow Show Trails and the general attack on all 'Trotsky Fascists'. This was a time when every weapon was used in a campaign of disinformation, one based on the grossest abuse of language by the communist and socialist left, one based on the systematic rewriting of history. After all, he who controls the past controls the future.

Orwell, who had been serving on the Catalan front, returned to Barcelona in May of 1937. There he discovered that the free and comradely atmosphere that he had encountered when he first came to Spain had changed utterly. He was to be caught up in some extraordinary events now known as the Barcelona May Days, in which one left-wing faction fought against another left-wing faction. In the communist controlled press the POUM was denounced as 'fascist plotters'. With agents of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police at work, Nin was arrested along with many others, and subsequently murdered in custody. Orwell himself had to leave Spain in fear of his life.

Homage to Catalonia is a straightforward account of his experiences at the front and in Barcelona, packaged in some general political musings. The language, as one would expect from one of the great modern masters of English prose, is limpid. It's an honest book, too honest for some; Victor Gollancz, the left-wing publishing house for whom he had previously written, refused to accept his account of his Spanish experience even before a single word had been written. Why? Because he had served with the POUM, that's why. It should be remembered that Gollancz was not even controlled by the Communist Party. This attitude, this unwillingness to say anything critical of the official Soviet line, not stopping short of the Moscow Trials, was to be found right across much of the left-leaning and liberal opinion of the day. Of the British press Orwell was to write:

In Spain, for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship that is implied by an ordinary lie...I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various "party lines."

Orwell, as I have said, went to Spain with his politics largely unfocused. He came back a committed anti-Stalinist. He came back believing that there was a standard of objective truth that had to be defended, a standard of truth that should corrupted by the demands of propaganda or the exigencies of dictatorship. He came back believing that two plus two equals four; and if that is granted all else follows.

George Orwell on the Road to Damascus

A day or two before the conclusion of the Nazi-Soviet Pact George Orwell had a dream. I imagine lots of other people had the same dream at the same time, one clearly born of acute anxiety. Of his particular dream Orwell later wrote:

What I knew in my dream that night was that the long drilling in patriotism which the middle classes go through had done its work, and that once England was in a serious jam it would be impossible for me to sabotage.

It was his intention, if he could, to fight; he no longer wished to sabotage. Sabotage? A rather odd choice of word, don't you think? Sabotage what, exactly? But you see that is exactly what he had planned to do, to sabotage a 'capitalist' war in a rather school-boyish cloak-and-dagger fashion. I'll come on to this in a bit but I should begin with a word or two about Orwell's political development in the period leading up to the Second World War.

Having served in Spain on the side of the Republic he came away with the abiding and deepening conviction that Communism was not just a lie but a murderous lie, one that would pervert even the simplest of truths-even language itself-to achieve its ends. Even so he still held to a form of socialism which placed no faith at all in 'bourgeois' democracy, which in his view was just another lie, one that would always lead to fascism, even in England. For him democracy and fascism were as 'Tweedledee and Tweedledum', a view he had expressed in 1937, the same year that he said that the 'moneyed classes' might very well trick England into a new 'imperialist war.'

So, while even some committed pacifists, members of the Peace Pledge Union, were opening to an understanding that the only way to resist Hitler was by violence, Orwell was opposed to any notion of a broad political front in favour of war; not exactly pacifism, just intense hostility to a particular kind of war. Also, it has to be said, he was deeply hostile to any notion of a 'popular front', another legacy of his Spanish experience.

I imagine those who have read this far are slightly frustrated by my failure to mention just exactly what form his proposed anti-war sabotage would take. Well, here we go! The details of what follows are all in volume one of The Collected Essays, Papers and Journalism.

There you will find open sentiments of his continuing opposition to war throughout 1939. In Not Counting Niggers, an essay published in the Adelphi in July, he calls for the creation of a mass party to oppose war, a sort of anti-Popular Front. It was this campaign of opposition by print that he believed would be threatened as war came closer. There are several references in his private correspondence on the need to prepare for an 'underground campaign', to prepare a secret printing press and the like, with financial support from sympathisers. The following is fairly typical of his mood and outlook;

I believe it is vitally necessary for those of us who intend to oppose the coming war to start organising for illegal anti-war activities. It is perfectly obvious that any open and legal agitation will be impossible...if we don't make preparations we may find ourselves silenced or absolutely helpless when either war or the pre-war fascizing process begins. (4 January)

We are therefore in either for war in the next two years, or for a prolonged war-preparation, or possibly only for sham war preparation designed to cover up other objects, but in any of these cases for a fascizing process leading to an authoritarian regime i.e. some kind of austro-fascism. (5 March)

The switch came suddenly. I can't pinpoint it exactly, but it is virtually certain that 'he saw the light' within days, if not hours, of the conclusion of the Hitler Stalin Pact.

In All of Orwell Clive James, another brilliant essayist, details the continuing political development of Orwell during the war itself, his admission, amongst other things, that he was wrong in saying that Hitler would only be defeated after a revolution in England. It went further. For, as James says, Orwell wrote less and less of 'bourgeois democracy', coming to suspect that the democratic part might very well depend on the bourgeois part.

The brilliance of Orwell, the reason I love his work so much, is that he represents a uniquely British intellect, a kind of native genius that, while it may have embraced abstract and alien theories, it was never enthralled to them. Orwell was a journalist and an empiricist before all else. For him facts were always going to undermine bogus preconceptions and second-hand truths, all that dusty theoretical baggage lifted from the attic of the mind.

Orwell and the Development of Despair

When I was in sixth form at school I wrote an essay for my Eng Lit class, to which I gave the rather grand title The Development of Despair in the Work of George Orwell. Yes, there is indeed a consistent theme in Orwell’s writing, which it is possible to pick up as early as Burmese Days, his first novel, through his essays and reportage, all the way to Nineteen Eighty-Four. The theme is one of cultural and political pessimism, of the little man drowning, of a world corrupted by the abuse and misuse of language, a world set on the destruction of individuality and all sense of the self.

Orwell manages to combine a belief in socialism-which barely lightens his deep sense of disquiet-with a kind of nostalgia for a world lost in the Great War;

From the whole decade before 1914 there seems to breath forth a smell of the more vulgar, un-grown-up kind of luxury, a smell of brilliantine and crème-de-menthe and soft-centred chocolates-an atmosphere, as it were, of eating everlasting strawberry ices on the green lawns to the tune of the Eton Boating Song.

In many ways his perspective is really that of an old-fashioned 'muscular Christian', standing on the island of simple decency, threatened by the rising waters of ideological intolerance of all kinds.

In one of his most brilliant essays, that on Charles Dickens, published in 1939, he concludes by describing the face of the author which emerges from his writings;

It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry-in other words of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

His experience of the 'smelly little orthodoxies' is fully described in Homage to Catalonia, his account of his own experiences during the Spanish Civil War. It was from this point that he began to perceive the corruption of language-and the deliberate rewriting of history-as a serious problem for the modern age. In his novels the type depicted most consistently is the 'little man', always from the same lower-middle class background (Orwell's own), who is being submerged by an impersonal modern world.

As novels most of them are actually not of a particularly high order, especially Keep the Aspidistra Flying, with the tiresome and self-pitying Gordon Comstock, a character later to emerge as George Bowling and, later still, as Winston Smith, his final hero. But the novel, it seems to me, that reveals most about Eric Blair the man, as opposed to George Orwell the author, is Coming Up For Air, by far his best since Burmese Days, and the one that anticipates Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is in a sense Orwell's David Copperfield, combining his political ideas, his personal experiences, his sense of the 'powerlessness' of the individual, his nostalgia and his fears about the future;

I'll tell you what my stay in Lower Binfield had taught me, and it is this. It's all going to happen. All the things you've got at the back of your mind, the things you're terrified of, the things that you tell yourself are just a nightmare or only happen in foreign countries. The bombs, the food-queues, the rubber truncheons, the barbed wire, the coloured shirts, the slogans, the enormous faces, the machine-guns squirting out of bedroom windows. I know it's all going to happen. I know it-at any rate I knew it then. There's no escape. Fight against it if you like, or look the other way and pretend not to notice, or grab your spanner and rush out to do a bit of face-smashing along with the others. But there's no way out. It's just something that's got to happen

Oh, my, how I knew it all. :-))