A Life in Letters Page 12
My wound was not much, but it was a miracle it did not kill me. The bullet went clean through my neck but missed everything except one vocal cord, or rather the nerve governing it, which is paralysed. At first I had no voice at all, but now the other vocal cord is compensating and the damaged one may or may not recover. My voice is practically normal but I can't shout to any extent. I also can't sing, but people tell me this doesn't matter. I am rather glad to have been hit by a bullet because I think it will happen to us all in the near future and I am glad to know that it doesn't hurt to speak of. What I saw in Spain did not make me cynical but it does make me think that the future is pretty grim. It is evident that people can be deceived by the anti-Fascist stuff exactly as they were deceived by the gallant little Belgium stuff, and when war comes they will walk straight into it. I don't, however, agree with the pacifist attitude, as I believe you do. I still think one must fight for Socialism and against Fascism, I mean fight physically with weapons, only it is as well to discover which is which. I want to meet Holdaway5 and see what he thinks about the Spanish business. He is the only more or less orthodox Communist I have met whom I could respect. It will disgust me if I find he is spouting the same defence of democracy and Trotsky-Fascist stuff as the others.
I would much like to see you, but I honestly don't think I shall be in London for some time, unless absolutely obliged to go up on business. I am just getting going with my book, which I want to get done by Xmas, also very busy trying to get the garden etc. in trim after being so long away. Anyway keep in touch and let me know your address. I can't get in touch with Rees*. He was on the Madrid front and there was practically no communication. I heard from Murry* who seemed in the weeps about something. Au revoir.
Yours
Eric
[XI, 381, pp. 53-4; typewritten]
1.Mrs Rayner Heppenstall.
2.In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell tells how his hotel room was searched by six plain-clothes policemen, who took away 'every scrap of paper we possessed', except, fortunately, Eileen's and his passports and their cheque-book. He learned later that the police had seized some of his belongings, including a bundle of dirty linen, from the Sanatorium Maurin (see VI, p. 164). More than fifty years later, a document was discovered by Karen Hatherley in the National Historical Archive, in Madrid, that precisely confirmed this (XI, 374A, pp. 30-7).
3.Orwell's review of The Spanish Cockpit by Franz Borkenau appears in XI, 379, pp. 51—2. When reviewing his The Communist International in 1938 he wrote that he still thought the former 'the best book on the subject'. Dr Borkenau (1900-57) was an Austrian sociologist and political writer. From 1921-29 he was a member of the German Communist Party. He emigrated to Britain in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. Orwell greatly admired him and his work.
4.Homage to Catalonia.
5.N.A. Holdaway was a schoolmaster and Marxist theorist, a member of the Independent Socialist Party, contributor to The Adelphi, and Director of the Adelphi Centre.
To Charles Doran*
2 August 1937
The Stores
Wallington
Dear Doran,
I don't know your address, but I expect they will know it at the I.L.P. summer school, where I am going on Thursday. I was also there yesterday, to hear John McNair* speak.
I was very relieved when I saw young Jock Branthwaite,1 who has been staying with us, and learned that all of you who wished to had got safely out of Spain. I came up to the front on June 15th to get my medical discharge, but couldn't come up to the line to see you because they kept sending me about from hospital to hospital. I got back to Barcelona to find that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed in my absence, and they had kept it from the troops so successfully that on June 20th as far down the line as Lerida not a soul had heard about it, though the suppression had taken place on the 16th-17th. My first intimation was walking into the Hotel Continental and having Eileen and a Frenchman named Pivert,2 who was a very good friend to everyone during the trouble, rush up to me, seize me each by one arm and tell me to get out. Kopp* had just recently been arrested in the Continental owing to the staff ringing up the police and giving him away. MacNairdeg, Cottman* and I had to spend several days on the run, sleeping in ruined churches etc., but Eileen stayed in the hotel and, beyond having her room searched and all my documents seized, was not molested, possibly because the police were using her as a decoy duck for MacNairdeg and me. We slipped away very suddenly on the morning of the 23rd, and crossed the frontier without much difficulty. Luckily there was a first class and a dining car on the train, and we did our best to look like ordinary English tourists, which was the safest thing to do. In Barcelona one was fairly safe during the daytime, and Eileen and I visited Kopp several times in the filthy den where he and scores of others, including Milton,3 were imprisoned. The police had actually gone to the length of arresting the wounded P.O.U.M. men out of the Maurin [Hospital], and I saw two men in the jail with amputated legs; also a boy of about ten. A few days ago we got some letters, dated July 7th, which Kopp* had somehow managed to send out of Spain. They included a letter of protest to the Chief of Police. He said that not only had he and all the others been imprisoned for 18 days (much longer now, of course) without any trial or charge, but that they were being confined in places where they had hardly room to lie down, were half starved and in many cases beaten and insulted. We sent the letter on to McNair, and I believe after discussing the matter Maxton4 has arranged to see the Spanish ambassador and tell him that if something is not done, at any rate for the foreign prisoners, he will spill the beans in Parliament. McNair also tells me that there is a credible report in the French papers that the body of Nin,5 also I think other P.O.U.M. leaders, has been found shot in Madrid. I suppose it will be 'suicide,' or perhaps appendicitis again.6
Meanwhile it seems almost impossible to get anything printed about all this . . . [Here Orwell repeats what he had written to Rayner Heppenstall* on 31 July 1937 about the reactions of the New Statesman and Gollancz.*]
I went up to Bristol with some others to take part in a protest meeting about Stafford Cottman* being expelled from the Y.C.L.7 with the words 'we brand him as an enemy of the working class' and similar expressions. Since then I heard that the Cottmans' house had been shadowed by members of the Y.C.L. who attempt to question everyone who comes in and out. What a show! To think that we started off as heroic defenders of democracy and only six months later were Trotsky-Fascists sneaking over the border with the police on our heels. Meanwhile being a Trotsky-Fascist doesn't seem to help us with the pro-Fascists in this country. This afternoon Eileen and I had a visit from the vicar, who doesn't at all approve of our having been on the Government side. Of course we had to own up that it was true about the burning of the churches, but he cheered up a lot on hearing they were only Roman Catholic churches.
Let me know how you get on. Eileen wishes to be remembered.
Yours
Eric Blair
P.S. [handwritten] I forgot to say that when in Barcelona I wanted greatly to write to you all & warn you, but I dared not, because I thought any such letter would simply draw undesirable attention to the man it was addressed to.
[XI, 386, pp. 64-6; typewritten]
1.Jock Branthwaite (d. 1997) was the son of a miner. He served with Orwell in Spain. He remembered copies of The Road to Wigan Pier arriving at the Front and said the book did not offend his working-class sensibilities. He told Stephen Wadhams that Orwell was not a snob: 'I thought he was a wonderful man.' He got out of Spain on the last refugee boat from Barcelona to Marseilles. (See Remembering Orwell, pp. 83-4, 93, 99.) 2.Marceau Pivert was a contributor to Controversy.
3.Harry Milton was the only American serving with Orwell's unit. He and Orwell were talking when Orwell was shot through the throat (Homage to Catalonia, p. 138). He was Trotskyist and regarded Orwell as 'politically virginal' on arrival in Spain. They spent hours together discussing politics. Orwell was 'as cool as a cucumber' and 'a very discipl
ined individual' (see Remembering Orwell, pp. 81, 85, 90).
4.James Maxton (1885-1946), Independent Labour Party MP, 1922-46; Chairman of the ILP, 1926-31, 1934-39.
5.Andres Nin (1892—1937), leader of the POUM; he had once been Trotsky's private secretary in Moscow, but broke with him when Trotsky spoke critically of the POUM. He was murdered by the Communists after the customary Soviet interrogation in May 1937. (See Thomas, p. 523.) 6.This refers to Bob Smillie, thrown into jail in Valencia where according to his captors he died of appendicitis. (See Homage to Catalonia, p. 149.) 7.Young Communist League.
Orwell and The Road to Wigan Pier were subjected to vicious attacks by Communists and the extreme Left Press. Ruth Dudley Edwards describes Orwell as being 'blackguarded' by Harry Pollitt, leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the Daily Worker, 17 March 1937 (Victor Gollancz (1987), p. 248). Pollitt wrote: 'Here is George Orwell, a disillusioned little middle-class boy who, seeing through imperialism, decided to discover what Socialism had to offer . . . a late imperialist policeman . . . . If ever snobbery had its hallmark placed upon it, it is by Mr Orwell. . . . I gather that the chief thing that worries Mr Orwell is the "smell" of the working-class, for smells seem to occupy the major portion of the book. . . . One thing I am certain of, and it is this - if Mr Orwell could only hear what the Left Book Club circles will say about this book, then he would make a resolution never to write again on any subject that he does not understand.' Attacks on Orwell continued during the summer and finally Orwell sought Gollancz's help.
To Victor Gollancz*
20 August 1937
The Stores
Wallington
Dear Mr Gollancz,
I do not expect you will have seen the enclosed cutting, as it does not refer to anything you published for me.
This (see underlined words) is the--I think--third reference in the Daily Worker to my supposedly saying that the working classes 'smell.' As you know I have never said anything of the kind, in fact have specifically said the opposite. What I said in Chapter VIII of Wigan Pier, as you may perhaps remember, is that middle-class people are brought up to believe that the working classes 'smell,' which is simply a matter of observable fact. Numbers of the letters I received from readers of the book referred to this and congratulated me on pointing it out. The statement or implication that I think working people 'smell' is a deliberate lie aimed at people who have not read this or any other of my books, in order to give them the idea that I am a vulgar snob and thus indirectly hit at the political parties with which I have been associated. These attacks in the Worker only began after it became known to the Communist Party that I was serving with the P.O.U.M. militia.
I have no connection with these people (the Worker staff) and nothing I said would carry any weight with them, but you of course are in a different position. I am very sorry to trouble you about what is more or less my own personal affair, but I think perhaps it might be worth your while to intervene and stop attacks of this kind which will not, of course, do any good to the books you have published for me or may publish for me in the future. If therefore at any time you happen to be in touch with anyone in authority on the Worker staff, I should be very greatly obliged if you would tell them two things: 1. That if they repeat this lie about my saying the working classes 'smell' I shall publish a reply with the necessary quotations, and in it I shall include what John Strachey1 said to me on the subject just before I left for Spain (about December 20th). Strachey will no doubt remember it, and I don't think the C.P. would care to see it in print.
2. This is a more serious matter. A campaign of organised libel is going on against people who were serving with the P.O.U.M. in Spain. A comrade of mine, a boy of eighteen whom I knew in the line,2 was recently not only expelled from his branch of the Y.C.L. for his association with the P.O.U.M., which was perhaps justifiable as the P.O.U.M. and C.P. policies are quite incompatible, but was also described in a letter as 'in the pay of Franco.' This latter statement is quite a different matter. I don't know whether it is libellous within the meaning of the act, but I am taking counsel's opinion, as, of course, the same thing (ie. that I am in Fascist pay) is liable to be said about myself. Perhaps again, if you are speaking to anyone in authoritative position, you could tell them that in the case of anything actionable being said against me, I shall not hesitate to take a libel action immediately. I hate to take up this threatening attitude, and I should hate still more to be involved in litigation, especially against members of another working-class party, but I think one has a right to defend oneself against these malignant personal attacks which, even if it is really the case that the C.P. is entirely right and the P.O.U.M. and I.L.P. entirely wrong, cannot in the long run do any good to the working-class cause. You see here (second passage underlined) the implied suggestion that I did not 'pull my weight' in the fight against the Fascists. From this it is only a short step to calling me a coward, a shirker etc., and I do not doubt these people would do so if they thought it was safe.
I am extremely sorry to put this kind of thing upon you, and I shall understand and not be in any way offended if you do not feel you can do anything about it.3 But I have ventured to approach you because you are my publisher and may, perhaps, feel that your good name is to some extent involved with mine.
Yours sincerely
Eric Blair
[X, 390, pp.72-4; typewritten]
1.John Strachey (1901-63), political theorist, Labour MP, 1929—31, then stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for Oswald Mosley's New Party (of Fascist inclination), then supported Communism. He was Labour Minister of Food, 1945-50 and Secretary of State for War, 1950-51.
2.Stafford Cottman.*
3.Gollancz told Orwell he was passing his letter on 'to the proper quarter'. That proved to be the Communist Party's offices in King Street, London. To Pollitt, he wrote, 'My dear Harry, you should see this letter from Orwell. I read it to John [Strachey] over the telephone and he assures me that he is quite certain that he said nothing whatever indiscreet.' What Strachey said is not known. However, the attacks did, for the moment, cease.
To Geoffrey Gorer*
15 September 1937
The Stores
Wallington
Dear Geoffrey,
Thanks so much for your letter. I am glad you are enjoying yourself in Denmark, though, I must admit, it is one of the few countries I have never wanted to visit. I rang you up when I was in town, but of course you weren't there. I note you are coming back about the 24th. We shall be here till the 10th October, then we are going down to Suffolk to stay at my parents' place for some weeks. But if you can manage it any time between the 24th and the 10th, just drop us a line and then come down and stay. We can always put you up without difficulty.
What you say about not letting the Fascists in owing to dissensions between ourselves is very true so long as one is clear what one means by Fascism, also who or what it is that is making unity impossible. Of course all the Popular Front stuff that is now being pushed by the Communist press and party, Gollancz and his paid hacks etc., etc., only boils down to saying that they are in favour of British Fascism (prospective) as against German Fascism. What they are aiming to do is to get British capitalist-imperialism into an alliance with the U.S.S.R. and thence into a war with Germany. Of course they piously pretend that they don't want the war to come and that a French-British-Russian alliance can prevent it on the old balance of power system. But we know what the balance of power business led to last time, and in any case it is manifest that the nations are arming with the intention of fighting. The Popular Front boloney boils down to this: that when the war comes the Communists, labourites etc., instead of working to stop the war and overthrow the Government, will be on the side of the Government provided that the Government is on the 'right' side, ie. against Germany. But everyone with any imagination can foresee that Fascism, not of course called Fascism, will be imposed on us as soon as the war starts. So you will have Fascism with Communist
s participating in it, and, if we are in alliance with the U.S.S.R., taking a leading part in it. This is what has happened in Spain. After what I have seen in Spain I have come to the conclusion that it is futile to be 'anti-Fascist' while attempting to preserve capitalism. Fascism after all is only a development of capitalism, and the mildest democracy, so-called, is liable to turn into Fascism when the pinch comes. We like to think of England as a democratic country, but our rule in India, for instance, is just as bad as German Fascism, though outwardly it may be less irritating. I do not see how one can oppose Fascism except by working for the overthrow of capitalism, starting, of course, in one's own country. If one collaborates with a capitalist-imperialist government in a struggle 'against Fascism,' ie. against a rival imperialism, one is simply letting Fascism in by the back door. The whole struggle in Spain, on the Government side, has turned upon this. The revolutionary parties, the Anarchists, P.O.U.M. etc., wanted to complete the revolution, the others wanted to fight the Fascists in the name of 'democracy,' and, of course, when they felt sure enough of their position and had tricked the workers into giving up their arms, re-introduce capitalism. The grotesque feature, which very few people outside Spain have yet grasped, is that the Communists stood furthest of all to the right, and were more anxious even than the liberals to hunt down the revolutionaries and stamp out all revolutionary ideas. For instance, they have succeeded in breaking up the workers' militias, which were based on the trade unions and in which all ranks received the same pay and were on a basis of equality, and substituting an army on bourgeois lines where a colonel is paid eight times as much as a private etc. All these changes, of course, are put forward in the name of military necessity and backed up by the 'Trotskyist' racket, which consists of saying that anyone who professes revolutionary principles is a Trotskyist and in Fascist pay. The Spanish Communist press has for instance declared that Maxton is in the pay of the Gestapo. The reason why so few people grasp what has happened in Spain is because of the Communist command of the press. Apart from their own press they have the whole of the capitalist anti-Fascist press (papers like the News Chronicle) on their side, because the latter have got onto the fact that official Communism is now anti-revolutionary. The result is that they have been able to put across an unprecedented amount of lies and it is almost impossible to get anyone to print anything in contradiction. The accounts of the Barcelona riots in May, which I had the misfortune to be involved in, beat everything I have ever seen for lying. Incidentally the Daily Worker has been following me personally with the most filthy libels, calling me pro-Fascist etc., but I asked Gollancz to silence them, which he did, not very willingly I imagine. Queerly enough I am still contracted to write a number of books for him, though he refused to publish the book I am doing on Spain before a word of it was written.