Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia

File:Homage catalonia.jpg
Author	George Orwell
Language	English
Genre	Non-Fiction, Political
Publisher	Secker and Warburg (London)
Publication date	25 April 1938
Publication place	United Kingdom
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	368 pp (Paperback edition) 248 pp (Hardback edition)

Homage to Catalonia is political journalist and novelist George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War. The first edition was published in 1938. The book was not published in the United States until February 1952. The American edition had a preface written by Lionel Trilling. The only translation made in Orwell's lifetime was into Italian, in December 1948.

Overview

Orwell served as both a private and a corporal in Catalonia and Aragon from December 1936 until June 1937. The political party whose militia he served with (the POUM, an anti-Stalinist communist party) was declared an illegal organization and Orwell was subsequently forced to flee or face imprisonment. Having arrived in Barcelona about 26 December he told John McNair, the ILP's representative there, that he had " come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism." He also told McNair that " he would like to write about the situation and endeavour to stir working class opinion in Britain and France." McNair took him to the POUM barracks, where Orwell immediately enlisted. "Orwell did not know that two months before he arrived in Spain, the NKVD's resident in Spain, Aleksandr Orlov, had assured NKVD Headquarters, 'the Trotskyist organisation POUM can easily be liquidated' - by those, the Communists, whom Orwell took to be allies in the fight against Franco."

By his own admission, Orwell joined the POUM rather than the Communist-run International Brigades by chance—but his experiences, in particular his and his wife's narrow escape from the Communist purges in Barcelona in June 1937, greatly increased his sympathy for POUM and, while not challenging his moral and political adhesion to the cause of Socialism, made him a lifelong anti-Stalinist.

On 17 May 1937 Largo Caballero resigned. Juan Negrin, the next prime minister, left the "NKVD-controlled secret police unhindered in its persecution of persons who opposed the Moscow line. On 16 June, when the POUM was declared illegal, the Communists turned its headquarters in Barcelona into a prison for 'Trotskyists'...leaders were handed over to NKVD operatives and taken to a secret prison in Madrid..Nin taken to Alcala de Henares, where he was interrogated from 18 to 21 June..he was then moved to a summer house outside the city which belonged to the wife of Hidalgo de Cisneros and tortured to death..Diego Abad de Santillan remarked; "Whether Juan Negrin won with his communist cohorts, or Franco won with his Italians and Germans, the results would be the same for us."

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Andres Nin, leader of the POUM, kidnapped by Stalin's agents and tortured to death.

At the front, Orwell was shot through the throat by a sniper on 20 May 1937 and was nearly killed. He wrote in Homage to Catalonia that people frequently told him a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive, but that he personally thought "it would be even luckier not to be hit at all." After dressing at a first aid post about half a mile from the actual line, he was transferred to Barbastro and then to Lérida where he received only an external treatment of his wound. On the 27th he was transferred to Tarragona and on the 29th May to Barcelona. On 23 June 1937 Orwell and his wife Eileen, with John McNair and Stafford Cottman, boarded the morning train from Barcelona to Paris. They safely crossed into France. Sir Richard Rees later wrote that the strain of her experience in Barcelona showed clearly on Eileen's face : " In Eileen Blair I had seen for the first time the symptoms of a human being living under a political terror."

George Orwell and Eileen returned to England. After nine months of animal husbandry and writing up Homage to Catalonia at their cottage at Wallington, Hertfordshire, Orwell's health declined and he had to spend several months at a sanatorium in Aylesford, Kent.

Because of the book's criticism of the Communists in Spain, it was rejected by Gollancz, who had previously published all Orwell's books: "Gollancz is of course part of the Communism-racket" , Orwell wrote to Rayner Heppenstall in July 1937. Orwell finally found a sympathetic publisher in Frederic Warburg. Warburg was willing to publish books by the dissident left, that is, by socialists hostile to Stalinism.

The book was finally published in April 1938 but "made virtually no impact whatsoever and by the outbreak of war with Germany had sold only 900 copies."

According to John Newsinger, "the Communist vendetta against the book" was ongoing as recently as 1984, when Lawrence and Wishart published Inside the Myth, a collection of essays "bringing together a variety of standpoints hostile to Orwell in an obvious attempt to do as much damage to his reputation as possible."

Summary of chapters

It should be noted that the following summary is based on a later edition of the book which contains some amendments that Orwell requested: two chapters (formerly chapters five and eleven) describing the politics of the time were moved to appendices. Orwell felt that these chapters should be moved so that readers could ignore them if they wished; the chapters, which became appendices, were journalistic accounts of the political situation in Spain, and Orwell felt these were out of place in the midst of the narrative.

Chapter one

The book begins in late December 1936. Orwell describes the atmosphere in Barcelona as it appears to him at this time. " The anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing..It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle..every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle.. every shop and café had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized." "The Anarchists" (referring to the Spanish CNT and FAI) were "in control", tipping was prohibited by workers themselves, and servile forms of speech, such as "Señor" or "Don", were abandoned. He goes on to describe the scene at the Lenin Barracks (formerly the Lepanto Barracks) where militiamen were given "what was comically called 'instruction'" in preparation for fighting at the front.

" There were still women serving in the militias, though not very many. In the early battles they had fought side by side with the men as a matter of course. It is a thing that seems natural in times of revolution. Ideas were changing already, however." ( Barcelona, 1936. Militiawomen on beach near Barcelona.Photo : Gerda Taro).

He describes the deficiencies of the POUM workers' militia, the absence of weapons, the recruits mostly boys of sixteen or seventeen ignorant of the meaning of war, half-complains about the sometimes frustrating tendency of Spaniards to put things off until "mañana" (tomorrow), notes his struggles with Spanish (or more usually, the local use of Catalan). He praises the generosity of the Catalan working class . Orwell leads to the next chapter by describing the "conquering-hero stuff"—parades through the streets and cheering crowds—that the militiamen experienced at the time he was sent to the Aragón front.

Chapter two

In January 1937 Orwell's centuria arrives in Alcubierre, just behind the line fronting Zaragoza. He sketches the squalor of the region's villages and the "Fascist deserters" indistinguishable from themselves. On the third day rifles are handed out. Orwell's "was a German Mauser dated 1896.... It was rusty, the bolt was stiff, the wooden barrel-guard was split; one glance down the muzzle showed that it was corroded and past praying for." The chapter ends on his centuria's arrival at trenches near Zaragoza and the first time a bullet nearly hit him. To his dismay, instinct made him duck.

Chapter three

Orwell, in the hills around Zaragoza, describes the mingled boredom and discomfort of stationary warfare, the mundaneness of a situation in which, " each army had dug itself in and settled down on the hill-tops it had won." He praises the Spanish militias for their relative social equality, for their holding of the front while the army was trained in the rear, and for the "democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline," - "more reliable than might be expected." " 'Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness - on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square." Throughout the chapter Orwell describes the various shortages and problems at the front—firewood, - " We were between two and three thousand feet above sea-level, it was mid winter and the cold was unspeakable", - food, candles, tobacco, and adequate munitions—as well as the danger of accidents inherent in a badly trained and poorly armed group of soldiers.

Chapter four

After some three weeks at the front, Orwell and the other English militiaman in his unit, Williams, join a contingent of fellow Englishmen sent out by the Independent Labour Party to a position at Monte Oscuro, within sight of Zaragosa. " Perhaps the best of the bunch was Bob Smillie - the grandson of the famous miners' leader - who afterwards died such an evil and meaningless death in Valencia." In this new position he witnesses the sometimes propagandistic shouting between the Fascist and Socialist trenches and hears of the fall of Málaga. ".. every man in the militia believed that the loss of Malaga was due to treachery. It was the first talk I had heard of treachery or divided aims. It set up in my mind the first vague doubts about this war in which, hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple." In February, he is sent with the other POUM militiamen 50 miles to make a part of the army besieging Huesca; he mentions the running joke phrase, "Tomorrow we'll have coffee in Huesca," attributed to a general commanding the Government troops who, months earlier, made one of many failed assaults on the town.

" I knew that I was serving in something called the P.O.U.M. (I had only joined the P.O.U.M. militia rather than any other because I happened to arrive in Barcelona with I.L.P. papers), but I did not realise that there were serious differences between the political parties."

Chapter five

Orwell complains, in chapter five, that on the eastern side of Huesca, where he was stationed, nothing ever seemed to happen—except the onslaught of spring, and, with it, lice. He was in a ("so-called") hospital at Monflorite for ten days at the end of March 1937 with a poisoned hand that had to be lanced and put in a sling. He describes rats that "really were as big as cats, or nearly" (in his famous Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell's character Winston Smith has a phobia of rats that Orwell himself shared to some degree). He makes reference to the lack of " religious feeling, in the orthodox sense" , and that the Roman Catholic Church, was, "to the Spanish people, at any rate in Catalonia and Aragon, a racket, pure and simple." He muses that Christianity may have, to some extent, been replaced by Anarchism. The latter portion of the chapter briefly details various operations in which Orwell took part: silently advancing the Loyalist frontline by night, for example.

Chapter six

One of these operations, which in chapter five had been postponed, was a "holding attack" on Huesca, designed to draw the Fascist troops away from an Anarchist attack on "the Jaca road." It is described herein. Orwell notes the offensive of that night where his group of fifteen captured a Fascist position, but then retreated to their lines with captured rifles and ammunition. The diversion was successful in drawing troops from the Anarchist attack.

Chapter seven

This chapter reads like an interlude. Orwell shares his memories of the 115 days he spent on the war front, and its influence on his political ideas, " ..the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of socialism...the ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England..the effect was to make my desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before." By the time he left Spain, he had become a "convinced democratic Socialist." The chapter ends with Orwell's arrival in Barcelona on the afternoon of April 26 1937.

Chapter eight

Herein Orwell details noteworthy changes in the social and political atmosphere when he returns to Barcelona after more than three months at the front. He describes a lack of revolutionary atmosphere and the class division that he had thought would not reappear, i.e., with visible division between rich and poor and the return of servile language. Orwell had been determined to leave the POUM, and confesses here that he "would have liked to join the Anarchists," but instead sought a recommendation to join the International Column, so that he could go to the Madrid front. The latter half of this chapter is devoted to describing the conflict between the Anarchist CNT and the Socialist UGT and the resulting cancellation of the May Day demonstration and the build-up to the street fighting of the Barcelona May Days. "It was the antagonism between those who wished the revolution to go forward and those who wished to check or prevent it - ultimately, between Anarchists and Communists."

Chapter nine

Orwell relates his involvement in the Barcelona street fighting that began on 3rd of May when the Government Assault Guards tried to take the Telephone Exchange from the CNT workers who controlled it. For his part, Orwell acted as part of the POUM, guarding a POUM-controlled building. Although he realises that he is fighting on the side of the working class, Orwell describes his dismay at coming back to Barcelona on leave from the front only to get mixed up in street fighting. Assault Guards from Valencia arrive - "All of them were armed with brand-new rifles..vastly better than the dreadful old blunderbusses we had at the front." The P.S.U.C. papers declare POUM to be a disguised Fascist organization - "No one who was in Barcelona then..will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues, and prowling gangs..." In his second appendix to the book, Orwell discusses the political issues at stake in the May 1937 Barcelona fighting, as he saw them at the time and later on, looking back.

Chapter ten

Here he begins with musings on how the Spanish Civil War might turn out. Orwell predicts that the "tendency of the post-war Government... is bound to be Fascistic." He returns to the front, where he is shot through the throat by a sniper, an injury that takes him out of the war. After spending some time in a hospital in Lleida, he was moved to Tarragona where his wound was finally examined more than a week after he'd left the front.

Chapter eleven

Orwell tells us of his various movements between hospitals in Siétamo, Barbastro, and Monzón while getting his discharge papers stamped, after being declared medically unfit. He returns to Barcelona only to find that the POUM had been "suppressed": it had been declared illegal the very day he had left to obtain discharge papers and POUM members were being arrested without charge. " The attack on Huesca was beginning..there must have been numbers of men who were killed without ever learning that the newspapers in the rear were calling them Fascists. This kind of thing is a little difficult to forgive." He sleeps that night in the ruins of a church; he cannot go back to his hotel because of the danger of arrest.

" And I hope the account I have given is not too misleading..consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan..beware of my partisanship,..and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period of the Spanish war." ( Ch. XII)

Chapter twelve

This chapter describes his and his wife's visit to Georges Kopp, unit commander of the ILP Contingent while Kopp was held in a Spanish makeshift jail, - " really the ground floor of a shop." Having done all he could to free Kopp, ineffectively and at great personal risk, Orwell decides to leave Spain. Crossing the Pyrenees frontier, he and his wife arrived in France "without incident."

Appendix one

The broader political context in Spain and the revolutionary situation in Barcelona at the time is discussed. The political differences among the PSUC (the Socialist Party of Catalonia - entirely under Communist control and affiliated to the Third International), the anarchists, and the POUM, are considered.

Appendix two

An attempt to dispel some of the myths in the foreign press at the time (mostly the pro-Communist press) about the street fighting that took place in Catalonia in early May 1937. This was between anarchists and POUM members, against Communist/government forces which sparked off when local police forces occupied the Telephone Exchange, which had until then been under the control of CNT workers. He relates the suppression of the P.O.U.M. on 15-16 June 1937 , gives examples of the Communist Press of the world - (Daily Worker , 21 June, SPANISH TROTSKYISTS PLOT WITH FRANCO), indicates that Indalecio Prieto hinted, "fairly broadly..that the government could not afford to offend the Communist Party while the Russians were supplying arms." He quotes Julián Zugazagoitia, the Minister of the Interior; " We have received aid from Russia and have had to permit certain actions which we did not like."

(In a letter he wrote in August 1938, protesting against the treatment of a number of members of the Executive Committee of the POUM, shortly to be put on trial on the charge of espionage in the Fascist cause, Orwell repeats these words of Zugazagoitia. An editorial note on the letter adds: " During a cabinet meeting, 'Zugazagoitia demanded if his jurisdiction as Minister of the Interior were to be limited by Russian policemen', according to Thomas. ( Hugh Thomas The Spanish Civil War 704) 'Had they been able to purchase and transport good arms from US, British, and French manufacturers, the socialist and republican members of the Spanish government might have tried to cut themselves loose from Stalin.')

"In Catalonia (in 1997), a square near the Barcelona waterfront was named Plaça George Orwell, while a street in the town of Can Rull was named Calle Andres Nin..the history of the Civil War that is taught to Catalan schoolchildren now includes Orwell, and has been wiped clean of any totalitarian or revisionist taint."

Reviews

Contemporary reviews of the book were mixed. Notably positive reviews came frrom Geoffrey Gorer in Time and Tide , and from Philip Mairet in the New English Weekly. Geoffrey Gorer concluded, 'Politically and as literature it is a work of first-class importance.' Philip Mairet observed , 'It shows us the heart of innocence that lies in revolution; also the miasma of lying that, far more than the cruelty, takes the heart out of it.' Hostile notices came from the Tablet, where a Catholic critic wondered why Orwell had not troubled to get to know Fascist fighters and enquire about their motivations, and from the Times Literary Supplement and The Listener, from obvious Communists, the first misrepresenting what Orwell had said and the latter attacking the POUM but never mentioning the book. A mixed review was supplied by V.S. Pritchett who called Orwell naive about Spain but added that, 'no one excels him in bringing to the eyes, ears and nostrils the nasty ingredients of fevered situations; and I would recommend him warmly to all who are concerned about the realities of personal experience in a muddled cause.'

Aftermath

Barcelona under the Anarchists would remian with Orwell. "No one who was in Spain during the months when people still believed in the revolution will ever forget that strange and moving experience. It has left something behind that no dictatorship, not even Franco's, will be able to efface." In the words of a recent biographer, Gordon Bowker, " the people that had effaced that reality, the Soviet Communists, now had an implacable enemy they would come to regret having made." A simple hostility to Stalinist Communism became a " deep-dyed loathing of it". Animal Farm, " his scintillating 1944 satire on Stalinism" was one result of his response to the Spanish betrayal. Totalitarianism, the new creed of 'the streamlined men' of Fascism and Communism, was, in Gordon Bowkers words again, a new manifestation of Orwell's old Catholic enemy, the doctrine of Absolutism - the ghost of Torquemada had arisen, imprisonment without trial, confessions extracted under torture with summary executions to follow. " The essential fact about a totalitarian regime is that it has no laws. People are not punished for specific offences, but because they are considered to be politically or intellectually undesirable. What they have done or not done is irrelevant." Apart from the betrayal of the POUMists, the terror and the murder of Nin and Smillie, Orwell was depressed by the attitude of the British press. "In Spain..I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts..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." Unlike the writer John Dos Passos however, "who also had a friend killed in custody by the SIM (Spanish Secret Police) in Spain, and reacted by deserting the Communists and shifting decidedly to the right, Orwell never did abandon his socialism: if anything, his Spanish experience strengthened it. "

See also

• Anarchist Catalonia
• Bibliography of George Orwell
• ILP Contingent described in Homage to Catalonia
• Spanish Civil War
• Spanish Revolution

External links

• Homage to Catalonia - Searchable, indexed etext.
• Homage to Catalonia Complete book with publication data and search option.
• Homage to Catalonia Complete book as plain text.
• Looking back on the Spanish War - an essay written 6 years later.
• George Orwell in Lleida A photograph of a column of the POUM, including a man who appears to be Orwell, about 1936/37.