Homage to Catalonia

While visiting my son Jesse, Eileen, and new grandson Henry in New York, I picked a book of Eileen's from their bookshelf to read: Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell. I liked it immediately and requested it from my local library - have been reading it on and off for the last few days and am now about one-half done.

Like everyone else, I was required to read Animal Farm and 1984 in high school or jr. high - can't remember which - and although I liked these OK, it was Down and Out in Paris and London that really made me appreciate Orwell's clear-eyed views of society, his highly empathetic but realistic picture of the underprivileged, and his simple but powerful style of writing.

Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's account of his few months fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, was written in the same voice as Down and Out and immediately engaged me. Orwell had gone to Spain to cover the war as a journalist, but was quickly galvanized by the revolutionary spirit of the Republican side and enlisted with the POUM (Party of Marxist Unification), being sent to the front in Catalonia after the briefest and most inadequate of training periods. The weapons they received were antiquated and largely useless and he saw little action (though evidently he is severely wounded as described later in the book).

Orwell truly desired to fight for the revolutionaries, who wished to create a classless society - at one point he says "When I joined the Militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist - after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct". The revolutionary factions were aligned with the Communists, but Orwell came to believe that the Communists, though fighting hard to defeat Franco and the Facists, were surprisingly, bitterly opposed to the revolution - in Orwell's view, this was because the Communists were desperate to placate and obtain support from the pro-Democratic supporters in England and France who would be essential allies for the Soviets to resist invasion by Nazi Germany.

These differences caused enormous bickering and divisions between the "allies", especially as the Communists accused the POUM of deliberately impeding the war effort and, in effect, of being traitors. Orwell's summation of these events is devastating:

"This, then is what they were saying about us: we were Trotskyists, Fascists, traitors, murderers, cowards, spies, and so forth. I admit it was not pleasant, especially when one thought of some of the people who were responsible for it. It is not a nice thing to see a Spanish boy of fifteen carried down the line on a stretcher, with a dazed white face looking out from among the blankets, and to think of the sleek persons in London and Paris who are writing pamphlets to prove that this boy is a Fascist in disguise."

There are many more instances in which Orwell concludes a clear, factual account of events or summary of views with a simple but stunning anecdote.

The introduction to this edition is written by the social critic Lionel Trilling, who contrasts Orwell's book with the genre of "personal confession of involvement and then of disillusionment with Communism". He says

"Orwell's ascertaining of certain political facts was not the occasion for a change of heart, nor for a crisis of soul. What he learned from his experiences in Spain of course pained him very much, and it led him to change his course of conduct. But it did not destroy him, it did not, as people say, cut the ground from under him. It did not shatter his faith in what he previously believed, nor weaken his political impulse, nor even change its direction. It produced not a moment of doubt or self-recrimination."

I find Orwell so attractive because his belief in equality and his empathy for those in misfortune are so strong, clear-eyed, and durable.

November 8 Update
Just finished the book - very serious and powerful, but with light touches and ultimately optimistic, despite Orwell's dismal experience and the reality of betrayal and infighting among the pro-government factions.

The safest thing at present was to look as bourgeois as possible. We frequented the fashionable residential quarter of the town, where our faces were not known, went to expensive restaurants and were very English with the waiters. For the first time in my life I took to writing on the walls. The passage-ways of several smart restaurants had "Visca P.O.U.M." scrawled on them, as large as I could write it. All the while, though I was technically in hiding, I could not feel myself in danger. The whole thing seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable English belief that 'they' cannot arrest you unless you have broken the law. It is a most dangerous belief to have during a political pogrom.

The last several lines of the book are very powerful, but I will not write anything here to spoil them. Instead, I will finish with one observation of Orwell's so contrary to my own views that I was quite amused. He comments thus, on this now landmark Gaudi cathedral in Barcelona:

For the first time since I had been in Barcelona I went to have a look at the cathredal - a modern cathedral, and one of the most hideous buildings in the world. It has four crenellated spires exactly the shape of hock bottles. Unlike most of the churches in Barcelona it was not damaged during the revolution - it was spared because of its 'artistic value,' people said. I think the Anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance...

One can only imagine what Orwell would have thought of Gehry's Bilbao Museum!