3.5
Una testimonianza della Guerra civile spagnola scritta da una delle penne più famose al mondo. Si legge facilmente e, tra le vicende narrate, compaiono descrizioni della Spagna e delle sue città che impreziosiscono il racconto. Sotto la voce di un narratore che scrive in prima persona , si sente comunque l’impostazione da giornalista, abituato a esprimere concetti in maniera chiara e a portare prove per dimostrare ciò che afferma. Consigliato.

Towards the end of 1936, Orwell and his new wife, Eileen, decided to up-sticks from their idyllic cottage in Hertfordshire (only a few miles from my own home), and head south to Barcelona. Orwell joined the Socio-Communist P.O.U.M. militia group so that he could take up (fairly hapless) arms against Franco’s Fascist uprising.

Homage to Catalonia charts the ensuing adventure and the evolution of Orwell’s feelings on the Spanish Civil War. Even though it is a journal of facts, it largely reads like a thrilling novel — the storytelling is just that exciting! —, and so, as much as I’d like to talk about some of the history here, I also wouldn’t want to reveal any spoilers.

My one minor complaint is just that I wish Orwell had coloured in his peripheral characters a bit more extensively than he did. Had Homage to Catalonia actually been a novel you would have expected his companions to come to the forefront more than they do. Naturally, Orwell’s purpose wasn’t to write a piece of entertainment fiction, so fair is fair; but I can’t help but feel the book would have been more memorable if he’d made it slightly less tightly focused on his internal observations of the conflict and, instead, included more details of his day-to-day interactions with his companions and given their personalities a bit more flavour. His wife, for instance, always lingers in the action’s shadows and is never once referred to by name. But what was she doing with her time in Spain when Orwell wasn’t around? How did she feel about the whole adventure? Were her anti-fascist feelings as strong as Orwell’s or was she merely there to fulfil some unfair matrimonial obligation? — from this book alone it’s impossible to tell, but I’d love to have known. I feel I ought to have known. I imagine she must have been one hell of a person.

I’d recommend Homage to Catalonia, therefore, less for its cast of characters (or even for its historical relevance), and more for the simple pleasure of spending time in the company of a writer like George Orwell: A man who always went to great lengths to find the truth before settling on any convictions and who then consistently followed through on his resolutions with direct action. His name is the definition of integrity — his day’s equivalent to the people who have dropped everything and left to go and fight on the front line in Ukraine.

Some people are just natural-born heroes. I’m not one of them. I couldn’t attest to my bravery (nor, in fairness, to my lack of it) — I’ve simply never really found myself in a situation that’s called for it to any great degree. In fact, thinking back, the bravest thing I ever did was probably when I was at school when I was about 14: My friends had been disrespecting some flower arrangement thing on the lunch table (dirty little teenage snot-rags that they were), and so I’d taken it off them and, while brandishing it, passionately declared that they should “Stop destroying nice things!” At this point, the school deputy head came over (attracted by the general ruckus) and started giving me (me!) a bollocking about vandalising school property: I rather lost my rag on account of this injustice, angrily corrected her grammar, and told her to go and find something more useful to do. She stood for a moment looking abashed, and then quietly shuffled away. One of the nearby group of sixth-formers said, “That was pretty awesome!” — It was my finest hour.

And so, in light of this, the evidence would suggest that I’m not an especially brave person. I’m fairly certain I’d never abandon my whole life to go and fight for someone else’s injustices in a faraway land. I don’t have that kind of deep conscientiousness: Unlike Eileen Blair, had I been Orwell’s significant other, I’d have probably told him to “Get lost!” and happily stayed at home in Hertfordshire, away from all the nasty bombs and fighting; I’d have left George-y-Boy to get on with his suicidal shenanigans while I guiltlessly enjoyed having an awfully lovely time playing Badminton and drinking Pimm’s in the back garden — sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England from which I shouldn’t have woken till I was jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

Reading this book, I felt inspired to be close to a person as driven to action by their morality as Orwell was. I found it interesting that, although he often talks about how he felt, rarely does he seem to find any of his experiences especially scary or tense. His dominant complaints seem to be mild irritations directed at the wartime inconveniences; mostly, the man just wanted a damn cigarette!

n  If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: ‘To fight against Fascism’, and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: ‘Common decency’. n

What a badass motherfucker!

Το "Πεθαίνοντας στην Καταλωνία" είναι ένα βιβλίο που περιγράφει βιωματικά την παρουσία του συγγραφέα του στον εμφύλιο πόλεμο της Ισπανίας. Χαρακώματα, στρατός, συμπλοκές και οδοφράγματα, διανθισμένα με πολιτικές αναλύσεις και προσωπικές σκέψεις του συγγραφέα. Θεωρητικά, αυτό το βιβλίο θα το βαριόμουν θανάσιμα. Αυτό που το κάνει να ξεχωρίζει όμως, είναι η διορατική δημοσιογραφική πένα του Orwell, που παρουσιάζει τα γεγονότα με όσο μεγαλύτερη αντικειμενικότητα μπορεί, αντιπαραβάλλοντας την εμπειρία του με τις διαστρεβλωμένες εκδοχές που παρουσίαζαν τα κόμματα, οι κυβερνήσεις και τα ΜΜΕ. Παραλλήλως, κάνει τον αναγνώστη να νιώθει φίλος και σύντροφός του στον πόλεμο εναντίον του φασισμού, χωρίς επιτηδευμένα δράματα και υπερβολές.

Should anyone want to understand why George Orwell, a life long socialist, developed the antipathy to the Soviet Union which informed his best known novels Animal Farm and 1984, then this is the book to read.

When Orwell travelled to Spain in December 1936, intending to fight fascism and write about the Spanish Civil War, he stepped into a complex and murky political situation. The left-wing forces supporting the Republican government against the fascist forces led by Franco had different and conflicting aims. The pro-Republic forces included the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM – Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista) which supported the Trotskyist aim of world revolution, the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. The latter was a wing of the Spanish Communist Party and was backed by Soviet arms and aid. Orwell's accreditation in Spain came from the British International Labour Party, which was linked with POUM. He accordingly joined the POUM militia and fought with it on the Aragon front at Alcubierre, Monte Oscuro and Huesco.

Orwell's account of experiences in Spain focuses on four distinct periods. Firstly, it deals with his initial time in the trenches on the reasonably quiet Aragon front. The next part of the narrative covers the internecine conflict in Barcelona in May 1937 which involved street-fighting between Communist groups loyal to Moscow* and anti-Soviet communists, socialists and anarchists. The third part of the work concerns Orwell's experience of being shot in the throat by a sniper when he returned to the Aragon front and the treatment he subsequently received for his injury. Finally, Orwell deals with the suppression of POUM and the consequent arrest of those associated with the organisation, which contributed to Orwell having to leave Spain in a hurry.

What led Orwell to turn so conclusively against Soviet style communism was the banning of POUM, the persecution of its leaders and members and his conviction that Moscow was behind the vilification of anarchist and non-Soviet aligned communist groups and specifically the accusation that they were fascist agitators. In the work, he analysed the propaganda against groups like POUM which was published in the communist newspapers at the time, both within Spain and abroad, and explained why he believed the claims against POUM and similar groups were baseless.

I know very little about the Spanish Civil War and this memoir, which was first published some nine months after Orwell left Spain, is not in any sense a history of that conflict. It obviously cannot be, given that it was published before the war ended and deals with Orwell's own experiences rather than with the bigger picture. Reading the work is like listening to an intelligent, thoughtful, well-informed friend talk about his experiences. The prose is clear and concise and the style is conversational, without being simplistic. The fact that Orwell wrote about his experiences so soon after the events in which he was involved took place gives an immediacy to the narrative.

The most difficult part of the work is coming to terms with the different groups involved in the conflict: they make up a veritable alphabet soup. But Orwell's explanation of the politics is clear and, as uninformed as I am, I found it very interesting. Just as interesting are the accounts of Orwell's fairly dull time on the front, where boredom, cold, discomfort and an infestation of lice made up the daily reality of life, his account of what it feels like to be shot in the throat and his account of being in Barcelona after POUM was suppressed. Ultimately, Orwell's departure from Spain read like a thriller.

I love Orwell's writing and this is an excellent example of what makes it so good. The work is honest, moving, passionate and sometimes prescient. The very last sentence - written in 1937 or 1938 - foretells the war yet to come. Orwell refers to the English "sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England" from which he feared that they would never wake until "jerked out of it by the roar of bombs".


*When Orwell referred to communists in this work, he was generally (although not always) referring to pro-Soviet groups and individuals. Substituting "Stalinist" for "communist" is a handy way of distinguishing between the various left wing factions.

George Orwell went to Spain to cover the civil war there and then actually joined the fighting, enlisting as a militia soldier fighting for a faction of the government against the fascist rebels.

This is an “on the ground” narrative as Orwell presents to us a soldier’s view of the war: from the trenches, standing cold watches, hungry, dirty, and always wanting cigarettes. He also explains to a reader almost a hundred years later about the complicated makeup of the republican government forces, composed of regulars but also of militia that were composed of political groups. Orwell fought with the POUM, which was later suppressed, and many of Orwell’s comrades were jailed and perhaps even killed while in political incarceration.

Orwell also provides a commentary on the Spanish people, seen in their worst time in civil war, with communist and fascist factions killing each other, but also of decent human beings who liked to laugh, to eat and to live. His description of Barcelona, just miles from the fighting, but where cafes and shops were still open and where people where anxious to get back to their lives.

I could not help thinking that this was the Orwell who a decade later would produce 1984. Perhaps it was from the brazenly partisan newspapers that he first kindled the idea of the Ministry of Truth. Maybe it was in his harried flight from Spain, fearing arrest, that he first began to think about The Party.

Good book.

*** btw, check out this photo, that's Orwell holding the puppy and you can see Ernest Hemingway behind him

An intimate look into the life a foreign militiaman fighting in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. I must say that I found all of the in-fighting between the various socialist/communist groups a bit of a convoluted mess, as I'm sure it was in actuality. The real shock of the thing is how utterly inept and unprepared the fighting forces seemed to be, and how it's a surprise anyone managed to win. And don't underestimate the power of lice.

[4.5] (I listened to the UK audiobook read by Jeremy Northam.)

How else could this have been written? The central narrative of Homage to Catalonia was like glimpsing a platonic ideal of non-fiction reportage: the definitive, the default - which must be because Orwell has become an (the?) exemplar of good English style, filtered into countless other things I've read, from books to below-the-line newspaper comments. (Sometimes I can see the lineage: a friend whose writing sometimes sounds like Hitchens, and Hitchens was inspired by Orwell - but mostly it's just everywhere.) I hadn't read a full book of Orwell's since my teens, either, so in that way too, it was revisiting something so familiar it must have been resident, quiescent in my subconscious.

It seemed to have the perfect balance between being about the writer, and about the 'important things' the book is supposed to be about. And of course he is a first-hand participant, by actually fighting in the war, in a way that few modern non-fiction writers are - and he was an experienced writer before he set out, unlike most memoirists. He mucks in, yet mentions human frailties: a dislike of mountains and a sensitivity to cold (linked?), and a loathing of rats that grows and, as millions will have realised before me, must have inspired Room 101. (A term which unfortunately makes me think of Paul Merton and the TV series first, and 1984 second.) He is sometimes very thoughtful - making an apology to readers who'd written to him about his last book, and whose letters had been taken during a raid on his hotel in Spain before he could reply - yet no paragon. He occasionally enjoys writing graffiti like a teenager, not a man of 33. His account of being hospitalised with a 'poisoned hand' is intriguing in its reflection of another time's attitudes and processes, in the way he doesn't consider it terribly serious, although it does require hospital, and is in outcome, a correction to those who assume that the death toll before antibiotics was 100%.

Political analysis is mostly in the long appendices at the end, about 25% of the book, which even Orwell advises skipping if you are not interested. These appendices have not stood the test of time, as explained here by a contemporary historian - and the level of detail is beyond what most readers will need now if they are not taking a course about the historiography of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, I found it impossible not to respect Orwell's intention to explain, and to be loyal to the group he had fought with. (And his negative experiences of the Spanish communist party also help make sense of his writing Animal Farm at a time when many British socialists were still enamoured of the Soviets.) Even if the analysis of the Barcelona fighting has its problems, his intimations of international war turned out to be right. His sense that Spain could only have a dictatorship after the civil war, even if the republicans won, cannot be tested, but it’s eerie to read now.

The main book was more of a narrative memoir than I had assumed, with most analysis left to the end. And there was unexpected dry humour - although such may be the way of war stories, humour as coping mechanism - and Northam's reading brought this out without ever overplaying it.
They impounded all papers, including the contents of the waste-paper basket, and all our books into the bargain. They were thrown into ecstasies of suspicion by finding that we possessed a French translation of Hitler's Mein Kampf. If that had been the only book they found our doom would have been sealed. It is obvious that a person who reads Mein Kampf must be a Fascist. The next moment, however, they came upon a copy of Stalin's pamphlet, Ways of Liquidating Trotskyists and other Double Dealers, which reassured them somewhat.
During the same episode, among the driest, darkest sentences of humour I've ever encountered: This was not a round-up of criminals; it was merely a reign of terror.
Another favourite subtly gave a fascinating picture of British political alignments of 1936:
the News Chronicle-New Statesman version of the war as the defence of civilization against a maniacal outbreak by an army of Colonel Blimps in the pay of Hitler.
That harks back to a time when appeasement policy was forseeable (and in effect was already being used towards Spain, under the guise of neutrality) - but less so Winston Churchill as PM and war leader, and Powell & Pressburger's refashioning of the Colonel Blimp stereotype into a patriotic wartime drama, no longer just the military Gammon of his day.

Orwell’s first-hand experience gives the potential for humour alongside serious coverage in a way that a political book of the day, or a history book, would not. And it also means more emotional involvement. His accounts of life in the trenches were occasionally harrowing to an extent for which I was not prepared. For the first time I understood what this - admittedly sponsored – study about audiobooks and emotion was getting at. I’ve also been listening to long audiobooks about Russians under Stalin, and British women in the Second World War, both of which quote individual testimonies, but here the duration of involvement with one account gave it a different dimension. (It was good to have experienced this, but I am not looking for such an emotive experience with audiobooks, so I will be careful about whole-book first-person narratives in future.) His bursts of anger, about men he knew who had died, didn’t always flow perfectly with the rest of the narrative, but they made it all the more human, and even better for it.

Being there on the ground, and writing in book form months later rather than a news reporter’s regular dispatches, meant he could give a medium-term overview of a type rarely heard by the general public about events this long ago. Of, for instance, the changes in manners and atmosphere in Barcelona in the months either side of his frontline service: he arrives to a remarkable experiment in socialism in which formal forms of address have been dropped and the attitudes of waiters are not deferential; and only months later, in a city that had been surprisingly comfortable and insulated away from the front, more traditional ways have begun to reassert themselves. Six months earlier, looking like a proletarian was what made you respectable and kept you safe; later it could be a risk.

The contrast between England and Spain - and especially that between the life a ‘lower upper-middle class’ Englishman (as Orwell elsewhere described his social standing) had been prepared for, and the conditions of the Spanish Civil War – is a recurring theme explored with a greater self-awareness and openness than plenty of contemporary popular travel writers would manage, who wouldn’t explicitly warn: beware of my partisanship, ... and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. I wondered if to some foreign readers he seemed to go on about England and Englishness too much, but to me it seems a necessary part of his exploration of why he finds things different, and of how he works out how to behave and survive under these conditions. He refers more than once to grappling with, and learning to disregard, an underlying belief that “they couldn’t arrest you unless you broke the law”, as happened in England. (Or perhaps as applied to men like him in England. It reminded me a little of a sheltered posh student discovering that drunk and disorderly was something that could actually apply to him too – although Orwell, being rather older and wiser, twigs well before it’s too late.) This being the 1930s, one can’t entirely escape essentialism and the idea of national characteristics, but what there is of it is based on real experience and observation, explained in detail. And any disgust at ‘backwardness’ is about the conditions people have to endure, for example in jails whose conditions were, he considers, last seen in Britain in the 18th century, or for peasants having to make do with a harrow made of wooden boards and flint, like something out of the later stone age, and which makes him look more kindly on industrialism.

Something in Homage to Catalonia, perhaps this observation of conditions and necessary behaviour, and awareness of one’s own position without spending excess time on deprecating it, gave me the sense that this would have been a good book to have absorbed before going on a student gap year to some troubled part of the world. (Perhaps more so before the social media boom where one hears about everything anyway.) There is some deep sense of how to cope and how to think in here, and immersion in a book narrating thought processes can inculcate them in a way a couple of sentences of direct advice can’t - a book about things that are almost certainly far worse than what you’d ever encounter, but which, similar to Ivan Denisovich could seem like a sort of toolkit for surviving things that seem difficult after a sheltered early life. I suppose the way I keep referring to students reflect my feelings that this is a book that should have been read earlier in life. Not that it doesn’t still have a lot to interest someone older as a memoir of immersion in historic events, and of another time, 80 years ago, when it was even more the case that “You could not, as before, 'agree to differ' and have drinks with a man who was supposedly your political opponent”, but the adventure and bravado, and realism and dumb luck of it all seem not merely interesting, but actually potentially illustrative and useful for teenagers and twentysomethings.

But what a thing this is to read in autumn 2018:
And then England - southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way… to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. 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 �� 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…
There are different concerns now about what is looming, but loom it does, and the safe, ensconced plushness, the feeling it's impossible bad things could happen, is part of why.


The reading, too, worked excellently. Northam was a recognisable name, an actor whom, in my teens, I saw in a stage play and, to stave off potential boredom rather because of any overwhelming interest, decided to fancy for the duration and a few weeks afterwards. In the past ten years or so, I'd noticed that he had been in various things on TV, but I was never interested enough to watch them. Here, like, or perhaps because of, Orwell's words, he seemed to be nothing at all to do with that actor from my teens, but a definitive/default male Radio 4 voice. (An anonymous one, rather than a recognisable classic like Brian Perkins.) A voice that could have been on there 20 or 30 years ago announcing the time and imminent programming, rather than someone you'd notice for their accent and as a mark of modernisation. It is an RP accent which does not tend towards the distractingly old-fashioned (now heard as affected) Mr Cholmondley-Warner type (which the real Orwell, for all I know, may have had, what with being born in colonial India in 1903) but which is classic and un-modern enough that it fused with the narrative until I felt I was hearing a story told by an Englishman who'd actually been in Spain the 1930s. (Really, though a voice of an actor who, when I was growing up, might have played a young man in some drama set in the 1930s.) The reading was practically faultless and strangely believeable as the voice of someone who'd written the words; the only slip I noticed was one of emphasis in mentioning Penguin Library books: the stress fell as if they had been borrowed library books, rather than purchased paperbacks, published by a particular imprint. I only really remembered I was listening to an actor when the Irish accent put on for brief conversation with a comrade was better than I think the average author would have done, and in the highly entertaining shifts of tone and volume in one scene in which a succession of people whisper to, and outright tell, Orwell that he must "get out" of a hotel where he has been staying, due to a raid. I must try and listen to Northam's reading of The Road to Wigan Pier as this is now what George Orwell sounds like in my head, and there is no good reason I never finished that book

Orwell is a brilliant writer. This is an account of his participation in the Spanish civil war. He has some motivation to counter lies and propaganda in publishing this. However, aside from historical value, many parts of this book are vivid, compelling, thoughtful, insightful. This book survived its immediate historical context for good reason.

“I had been about ten days at the front when it happened. The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail. It was at the corner of the parapet, at five o’clock in the morning. This was always a dangerous time, because we had the dawn at our backs, and if you stuck your head above the parapet it was clearly outlined against the sky. I was talking to the sentries preparatory to changing the guard. Suddenly, in the very middle of saying something, I felt – it is very hard to describe what I felt, though I remember it with the utmost vividness. Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the center of an explosion…”
-tGeorge Orwell,Homage to Catalonia

In 1936, George Orwell went to Spain with the intention of reporting on the ongoing civil war as a journalist. His purpose – as a dedicated socialist – was to highlight the fight against fascism, and to rouse the opinion of the working class in both Great Britain and France.

Evidently, Orwell decided that the best way to get close enough to write about the war was to become a part of it. He enlisted as a private in the Partido Obrero de Unificatión Marxista (POUM), a Marxist worker’s party militia. Thereafter, he went to the front, saw a bit of combat, became embroiled in the internecine conflict between various left-wing groups (a civil war within the civil war), was wounded, and was finally forced to escape Spain, chased not by fascists but by communists who had taken power and declared the POUM illegal. Soon afterwards, Orwell’s account of his experiences was published as the now-classic Homage to Catalonia.

(Orwell wrote this about seven months after his service ended. It was originally published in Great Britain in 1938. It did not make its way to America until 1952. The version I read is a reissue of the 1952 version, which is unfortunately sparse when it comes to explanatory footnotes or background).

The Spanish Civil War that Orwell so famously covered was incredibly complicated. Broadly speaking, it pitted Republicans (who were in lawful power) against Nationalists (who were in revolt). This does not nearly begin to convey the densely tangled alliances on both sides. The Republicans consisted of communists, anarchists, other socialist groups, and Ernest Hemingway. The Nationalists fielded an array of monarchists and conservatives, centered around General Francisco Franco. Ultimately, the war captured the world’s attention, drawing reporters and soldiers from around the globe. Many were convinced that the fates of communism, fascism, and democracy would be decided in Spain.

I mention the context because Orwell does not.

Homage to Catalonia was written contemporaneously with the events depicted. At the time – before World War II cast its long shadow – the Spanish Civil War was a well-known event. Accordingly, Orwell does not expend any effort explaining what he assumed his readers already knew, and jumps into his tale without filling in any of the backstory. If you’re thinking of tackling this, a primer might be in order (I’ve had the Modern Library revised edition of Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War on my shelf for twenty years. Just waiting for the stars to align on that one).

As to the content of the book, my reaction was surprisingly muted. I expected to love this, and ended up at an emotion quite a bit below that. This gave me pause, as Orwell is a famous author, and Homage to Catalonia is acknowledged as one of his finest works.

I always hesitate to criticize something that is roundly admired, especially as I am well-aware of my own deficits as a reader. In this case, I knew that my own ignorance about the Spanish Civil War – which cannot fairly be attributed to Orwell – played a role. Still, a lot of it has to do with the maddening inconsistency of the narrative. Some parts are great; others are torpor-inducing.

The parts devoted to Orwell’s frontline experiences are wonderful. He assumes an engaging voice that is both self-ironical and humble. Many memoirs tend to overstate and exaggerate, but this is certainly not the case here. If anything, Orwell underplays what happens, which gives Homage to Catalonia the ring of truth.

During his time in Spain, Orwell served mainly as a private and a corporal. As a result, this is really a ground-level view of warfare. With his sharp eye for detail, Orwell discusses the day-to-day drudgery of soldiering. Most of it is waiting around, being hungry or cold or dirty, and usually all three at once. He describes equipment shortages, antiquated weaponry (the jerry-rigged grenades sound horrifying, and it’s a wonder that Orwell had the guts to carry them around), endless watches, and the way that countless hours of tedium can be interrupted by a few terrifying seconds of shelling. Despite being on the frontlines, ostensibly closest to what’s going on, Orwell notes how he and his fellow soldiers seldom had a very good idea of the bigger picture. They were often in the dark, trying to piece things together through rumor, hearsay, and gossip.

There is never a great battle. As Orwell freely admits, he was posted away from the major areas of operations, meaning that he was not subjected to massive artillery bombardments, aerial bombings, or large troop concentrations. Still, Orwell memorably captures his participation in a no-name skirmish that nevertheless was fought for the highest stakes imaginable, his own life. It is a reminder that even the smallest gun-battle is light-years beyond the normal boundaries of existence.

Homage to Catalonia is brimming with humanity. Occasionally, there is a bit of sardonicism, especially with regard to the procrastination with which orders were carried out (the running joke is that things are always happening mañana, tomorrow). Orwell is also unflinching about the less-noble aspects of warfare, such as the hospital orderlies who steal everything of value off wounded men. For the most part, though, Orwell writes admiringly of the men he meets, their principles, their ability to endure, and their generosity.

Unfortunately, Orwell intercuts his wartime service with long discussions about the politics of the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, the longest sections of Homage to Catalonia take place in Barcelona, where the Republicans were far too busy liquidating themselves to worry about Franco. These ideologically-based contretemps were driven by the communists (supported from afar by Joseph Stalin) who were maniacally obsessed with finding “Trotskyists” in their ranks. The political machinations featured a dizzying array of political groups, many of them communicating in a language that Orwell would later dub “Newspeak” in 1984. This makes it incredibly hard to follow, especially without prior grounding on the subject.

Orwell himself admits that these parts of his book are pretty dry. In fact, he even recommends skipping them. I pushed through, however, since the political angle becomes so extensive that avoiding them would have left me with the sensation of having never read the book at all. Worse than the esoteric nature of this discussion is Orwell’s handling of it. He does not even pretend to be an objective observer, and instead seems to be engaging in a lot of score-settling. For instance, he frequently quotes or excerpts something written in the press, and then criticizes it as communist propaganda. This might have been impactful when Orwell first wrote it, but it has little relevance now.

Today, the Spanish Civil War is often seen as a foretaste of the tragedies to come between 1939 and 1945. Even though it is a striking historical event in its own right, it does not really get its due, in no doubt because many of the issues it raised were decided on the much larger, bloodier stage of World War II. In some ways, Homage to Catalonia suffers from this reality, as the party strife, doctrinal bickering, and political posturing Orwell covered now feels far more academic than enlightening.

With that said, Orwell’s work endures, not so much as a specific history, but as a realistic tale of men at war. There are many wartime memoirs, but most are written by people who were soldiers first and writers second. Orwell was always a writer first – he is humorously deprecatory about his martial virtues – and it shows. The ins-and-outs of the Spanish Civil War may have faded, but Orwell’s precise recollections of lice-ridden soldiers, of long winter nights on sentry duty, of what it feels like to aim a gun at another human being, and to be shot at in return, still burns brightly.

5/5

3 ½ stars.

Now, after many false starts …

In my first attempt at reviewing this, I began by saying “This is a first rate source for information … on the Spanish Civil War.” n  Wrong!!!n It really is a very poor source of information on the SCW. Because it is on a very personal level, and is mostly seen from a very limited and narrow point of view, this is really an almost useless book for learning anything historically significant about the war.

So, let’s start over.

Why is this book so famous?

The first reason should be obvious, its author. Orwell is one of my favorite authors, as he is for a great number of readers.

I believe the second reason is this. For many years Homage was one of the only English language, non-academic books available about the Spanish Civil War (with a famous author, no less). This book has been rated by over 17,000 readers here on GR. Among non-fiction books dealing with the war, I would venture that no others have been rated by even one-tenth that many readers.

What’s in the book.

The book is really two “books”. One “book”, the majority of the words, is about Orwell’s personal experiences in the war. A war memoir. The second “book” contains Orwell’s analysis of the machinations of the Soviet Government and the Communist Party during the war, specifically regarding the Spanish situation in that period.

There are two different layouts for the book.

The second of the above “books” was chapters V and XII of Homage to Catalonia as originally published. Orwell had second thoughts about this arrangement, and later suggested that these two chapters be moved to appendices. Some editions of the work have actually done this. Others have kept the original layout. It’s easy enough to tell about the book you read. If it has 14 chapters and no appendices, it’s the original layout; otherwise it will have 12 chapters and the two appendices. (The copy of the book I have is a paperback version of the first U.S. edition, in the original layout. It’s a Harvest Book, published by Harcourt Brace & World, with a copyright date of 1952. It contains an introduction by Lionel Trilling, which has been reprinted in many editions of the book since then.)

The first book - when. The 12 chapters of Orwell’s experiences in Spain take place from late in 1936 to about the middle of 1937. In Volume 1 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, titled An Age Like This 1920-1940, entry 92 is a letter dated 15 December 1936, in which he says that he should be leaving for Spain “in about a week”. Entry 99, dated 8 June 1937, is another letter, written while Orwell was still hospitalized in Barcelona. From the last couple chapters of Homage is would appear that it was probably no more than a couple weeks after this letter that, having been discharged from hospital and met up with his wife, they had made it across the border into France. Entry 100, an article called Spilling the Spanish Beans, was written after he was back in England, and appeared in two installments in New English Weekly on 29 July and 2 September.

The first book, as a war memoir. Frankly, it really isn’t very exciting. Of course it’s well written, but Orwell’s experiences on the front on which he was stationed, in Catalonia, southwest of Barcelona, didn’t really see all that much action. There was enough action for Orwell to receive a bullet wound in the neck, which could easily have killed him, and did put him in hospital for much of the remaining time he was in Spain. The chief interest of this majority of the book is mainly of the “this is what being stationed on a pretty inactive front was like in the mid 1930s in Spain” sort.

We meet few other characters (none of them memorable, for me) in which we can become interested, or who played an important part in Orwell’s own experiences.

The second book. In the second “book” Orwell goes into details of how he came to be connected to the Catalonian Anarchist formation he ended up with, instead of with a Communist formation. (He had had a letter of Introduction from a Communist organization in England, but it had little effect on how he was assigned by the Republican recruiters who were dealing with foreign volunteers.)

Then he tells us of the various contingents of the Republican forces, and the political leanings that they each had. Now here’s the thing. At least as far as I know, Orwell did not speak Spanish. So, first, whatever information he got was either from the few Spaniards he met that may have spoken English, or else second or third hand from non-Spanish English speakers. Then, since he was connected to an Anarchist unit, naturally much, if not most, of this information came from Anarchist-leaning men.

I don’t remember (and I haven’t the book at hand as I write) if Orwell gives any indication that he was familiar with the decades-old animosity that had existed between Communist, socialist, and at least two different flavors of anarchist political movements in Catalonia.

For these reasons, Orwell’s book is little used as a reference for histories of the Spanish Civil war by academics. He just didn’t have that deep a knowledge of what was going on politically on the Republican side, especially as regards the tides of semi-allied eras these groups had gone through, interspersed with longer and very violent periods of conflict between them.

Now I’m not saying that the things he writes in the book are flat wrong, or are useless. But I don’t think they are a dependable source of information. Of some other books I’ve read on this era of Spanish history, two contain MUCH more, and I’m sure better, information than is found in Orwell’s second “book”. These are (a) The Spanish Civil War A Very Short Introduction, and (b) Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth. The first book, by English historian Helen Graham, is a modern, up-to-date compendium, dense with information, about the causes of the war, the major phases of the military conflict, the political and social forces driving the two sides, and the brutal way in which Franco spent years afterwards making sure that those who had opposed him paid for their crimes; it makes use of much primary material that has become available only with the demise of Franco and the beginnings of a democratic Spain.

The second book is a magnificent summary of Spanish social and political movements for the 60-70 years preceding the SCW, with a brief Afterward written after the war was over. It does not deal directly with the years in which the War was fought.


What is wrong with Orwell’s version. Orwell seems to imply (though I don't know how closely he comes to saying this outright) that the Republican cause was basically betrayed by Stalinist/Communist machinations which produced mass arrests and imprisonments (and worse) of long standing major figures in the socialist and anarchist forces fighting for the Republic.

In her book, Graham writes that this considerably overstates the effect of these very right wing Stalinist activities in Spain (which certainly did happen), and in no way is the reason that the Republican side lost the war.

Far more important were these facts. (1) While Franco's forces were being supplied with weapons, tanks, planes, etc by the fascist governments of both Hitler and Mussolini, the Republican side was dependent on a single source of arms, Russia. (And at some point in the war, Stalin decided to cut his losses in this regard.) (2) The Republicans desperately wanted to be able to buy arms from other sources, but couldn't. Why couldn't they? (3) The attitude of England, whose capitalist power brokers were much more concerned with the prospect of the leftist Republicans winning than they were with the conservative, right wing Franco winning, prevented it. How? (4) England, and to a somewhat lesser extent France, led a diplomatic initiative which formed a very effective arms embargo on all of Spain throughout the war. Of course Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union paid no attention to this embargo, but other "law-abiding" countries were for the most part quite content to observe the embargo.

The Republicans never really had a chance, certainly after the time at which Russia cut off their arms supply - and really not even before that happened.

I would recommend either of the above books, or better yet both of them, as a source of information for (a) the SCW, and (b) the state of Spanish society when the Civil War broke out. This would be a far more useful reading exercise for this knowledge than Homage to Catalonia.

https://cronicasdemagrat.com/2016/05/...

Maravillosa crónica cargada de duras reflexiones pero también de mucha ironía y humor.
El relato de Orwell es muy sesgado y particular, narra su punto de vista sobre los meses que pasó en Cataluña y Aragón, no es en absoluto un tratado de Historia sino que todo lo conocemos desde su opinión... y quizás por eso sea tan interesante.
La visión de un inglés que se mete de lleno no solo en una guerra sino en medio de la sociedad española en plena guerra es algo que merece la pena ser leído. Me han gustado muchas cosas de este libro, se me ha encogido el corazón en algunos puntos pero también he llegado a reírme de verdad (sobretodo con algunas reflexiones sobre nuestro caracter "típico español").
Un libro, a fin de cuentas, que me ha marcado.