Orwell in Spain Read online

  S&A, Transformation: Peter Stansky and William Abrahams, Orwell: The Transformation (1979)

  Shelden: Michael Shelden, Orwell: The Authorised Biography (1991)

  The Thirties: Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties (1940; 1971); reviewed by Orwell, XII/615

  Thomas: Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War (rev. edn, 1977; Penguin, 1979)

  A fuller reading list is given in Further Reading.

  Peter Davison,

  De Montfort University, Leicester

  Acknowledgements

  George Orwell’s (Eric Blair’s) work is the copyright of the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell. Most of the documents in this edition are held by the Orwell Archive (founded by Sonia Orwell in 1960) at University College London. Gratitude is expressed to the Archive, and particularly its Archivist, Gill Furlong, for the help given the editor. A number of documents are in the possession of others and thanks to the following are gratefully extended: Archivo Histórico Nacional de España, Madrid, for the Spanish originals of the documents referring to Orwell (Blair) and Doran (374A); the BBC for the paragraph from the Weekly News Broadcast to India, 22 (1173); the British Library for Mss Add. 49384 (Kopp’s report on Orwell’s wound, 369); Mrs Bertha Doran and Waverley Secondary School, Drumchapel, Glasgow, for 386; the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, for 358 and 365; Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Texas, for 381 and 434; and Judith Williams for 386A.

  Headnotes, footnotes and the Note on the Text of Homage to Catalonia are copyright of Peter Davison.

  I wish to add a last acknowledgement to this, my favourite of Orwell’s books. Sheila, my wife for over fifty years, has been of inestimable help in the production of this and the other three volumes in this series, Orwell and the Dispossessed, Orwell and Politics and Orwell’s England. Her eyes, much sharper than mine, have spotted many errors in the course of proof-reading, and she has endeavoured to ensure I have written simply and straightforwardly. For this and so much else I am abidingly grateful.

  Orwell’s Journey to Spain, December 1936

  The Spanish Civil War was fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Spanish Republican Government and Nationalist rebels. The Republicans included socialists, communists, anarchists and Catalan and Basque nationalists, but also many moderates; the Nationalists comprised the conservative elements of Spain, including monarchists, Carlists, Falangists (fascists) and the Roman Catholic Church. The Soviet Union gave the Republicans (especially the communists) active support; the Nationalists were given heavier support by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Many foreigners fought on both sides, especially on behalf of the Republicans, notably in the International Brigade. Britain and France were among countries that pursued a non-interventionist policy. General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) played a vital role in ensuring the Nationalist victory. From September 1936 he served as Generalissimo of the Nationalist forces and after the war became dictator of Spain. The ferocity of the war led to heavy loss of life, directly in the fighting, ‘behind the lines’, and, after the war, in retributive killings and deaths in prison (perhaps some 100,000), a total of some half-million people in all.1

  On 10 December 1936, George Orwell wrote the first of a series of short letters to his literary agent, Leonard Moore, making arrangements for his journey to Spain, where he intended to fight on behalf of the Republicans. He confirmed that his bank had allowed him to overdraw to the tune of £50 (which Moore had guaranteed). He asked Moore to try to persuade the Daily Herald (a newspaper that supported the Left) to commission him to write ‘a few articles or something like that’ (327). No agreement was reached with the Herald. The next day he wrote an authorization for his agent giving his wife, Eileen, complete rights over his literary affairs and directed that all payments due to him should be paid to her (328). On 15 December he sent Moore the manuscript of The Road to Wigan Pier. This was processed very rapidly and on Saturday, 19 December, his publisher, Victor Gollancz, sent him a telegram asking him to call at Gollancz’s offices on the following Monday, 21 December, to discuss the book’s publication. Orwell telegraphed back to say he would be there at noon and they then discussed terms for the publication of the book and the inclusion of illustrations (341). Orwell endeavoured to win the support of Harry Pollitt, Secretary-General of the Communist Party, for his journey to Spain, but Pollitt, suspicious of Orwell’s political reliability (as he saw it), declined to help him. He did, however, advise him to obtain a safe-conduct from the Spanish Embassy in Paris. Orwell also obtained a letter of introduction from the Independent Labour Party (the ILP) to John McNair, its representative in Barcelona.2 Orwell arrived in Barcelona about 26 December. He described the journey (and an incident in Paris on the way) in his Tribune column, ‘As I Please’, in 1944. Jennie Lee (1904–88, Baroness Lee of Asheridge, 1970), first Minister of Arts and wife of Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960), under whose forceful leadership the National Health Service had been set up in 1948, described Orwell’s arrival in Barcelona in a letter to Margaret M. Goalby, written shortly after Orwell’s death.

  [2549]

  Extract from ‘As I Please’, 42 [The Journey to Spain]

  Tribune, 15 September 1944

  About the end of 1936, as I was passing through Paris on the way to Spain, I had to visit somebody at an address I did not know, and I thought that the quickest way of getting there would probably be to take a taxi. The taxi-driver did not know the address either. However, we drove up the street and asked the nearest policeman, whereupon it turned out that the address I was looking for was only about a hundred yards away. So I had taken the taxi-driver off the rank for a fare which in English money was about threepence.

  The taxi-driver was furiously angry. He began accusing me, in a roaring voice and with the maximum of offensiveness, of having ‘done it on purpose’. I protested that I had not known where the place was, and that I obviously would not have taken a taxi if I had known. ‘You knew very well!’ he yelled back at me. He was an old, grey, thick-set man, with ragged grey moustaches and a face of quite unusual malignity. In the end I lost my temper, and, my command of French coming back to me in my rage, I shouted at him, ‘You think you’re too old for me to smash your face in. Don’t be too sure!’ He backed up against the taxi, snarling and full of fight, in spite of his sixty years.

  Then the moment came to pay. I had taken out a ten-franc note. ‘I’ve no change!’ he yelled as soon as he saw the money. ‘Go and change it for yourself!’

  ‘Where can I get change?’

  ‘How should I know? That’s your business.’

  So I had to cross the street, find a tobacconist’s shop and get change. When I came back I gave the taxi-driver the exact fare, telling him that after his behaviour I saw no reason for giving him anything extra; and after exchanging a few more insults we parted.

  This sordid squabble left me at the moment violently angry, and a little later saddened and disgusted. ‘Why do people have to behave like that?’ I thought.

  But that night I left for Spain. The train, a slow one, was packed with Czechs, Germans, Frenchmen, all bound on the same mission. Up and down the train you could hear one phrase repeated over and over again, in the accents of all the languages of Europe – là-bas (down there). My third-class carriage was full of very young, fair-haired, underfed Germans in suits of incredible shoddiness – the first ersatz cloth I had seen – who rushed out at every stopping-place to buy bottles of cheap wine and later fell asleep in a sort of pyramid on the floor of the carriage. About halfway down France the ordinary passengers dropped off. There might still be a few nondescript journalists like myself, but the train was practically a troop train, and the countryside knew it. In the morning, as we crawled across southern France, every peasant working in the fields turned round, stood solemnly upright and gave the anti-Fascist salute. They were like a guard of honour, greeting the train mile after mile.

  As I watched this, the behaviour of the old taxi-driver gradually fel
l into perspective. I saw now what had made him so unnecessarily offensive. This was 1936, the year of the great strikes, and the Blum1 government was still in office. The wave of revolutionary feeling which had swept across France had affected people like taxi-drivers as well as factory workers. With my English accent I had appeared to him as a symbol of the idle, patronising foreign tourists who had done their best to turn France into something midway between a museum and a brothel. In his eyes an English tourist meant a bourgeois. He was getting a bit of his own back on the parasites who were normally his employers. And it struck me that the motives of the polyglot army that filled the train, and of the peasants with raised fists out there in the fields, and my own motive in going to Spain, and the motive of the old taxi-driver in insulting me, were at bottom all the same.

  1. Léon Blum (1872–1950) was the first Socialist Prime Minister of France, 1936–7 and 1938; he presided over a Popular Front government which enacted a series of reforms benefiting working men and women. He was imprisoned during the occupation of France by the Germans. He was again Prime Minister, 1946–7.

  [355A]

  Jennie Lee to Margaret M. Goalby, 23 June 1950: Orwell’s Arrival in Barcelona

  In the first year of the Spanish Civil War I was sitting with friends in a hotel in Barcelona when a tall thin man with a ravished [sic] complexion came over to the table. He asked me if I was Jennie Lee, and if so, could I tell him where to join up. He said he was an author: had got an advance on a book from Gollancz,1 and had arrived ready to drive a car or do anything else, preferably to fight in the front line. I was suspicious and asked what credentials he had brought from England. Apparently he had none. He had seen no-one, simply paid his own way out. He won me over by pointing to the boots over his shoulder. He knew he could not get boots big enough for he was over six feet. This was George Orwell and his boots arriving to fight in Spain.

  I came to know him as a deeply kind man and a creative writer… He was a satirist who did not conform to any orthodox political or social pattern… The only thing I can be quite certain of is, that up to his last day George was a man of utter integrity; deeply kind, and ready to sacrifice his last worldly possessions – he never had much – in the cause of democratic socialism. Part of his malaise was that he was not only a socialist but profoundly liberal. He hated regimentation wherever he found it, even in the socialist ranks.

  1. This advance was of £100 against royalties for The Road to Wigan Pier (see 341).

  Orwell in Spain, December 1936

  In George Orwell: A Life (317–18), Bernard Crick quotes from John McNair’s typescript, ‘George Orwell: The Man I Knew’, dated March 1965, in Newcastle upon Tyne University Library. McNair records that Orwell brought him one letter from Fenner Brockway (1888–1988, Lord Brockway, 1964), General Secretary of the ILP, and one from H. N. Brailsford (1873–1958), a socialist intellectual and journalist and leader-writer for several newspapers, including the Manchester Guardian; Orwell later corresponded with him (see below). McNair, a Tynesider, was at first put off by Orwell’s ‘distinctly bourgeois accent’, but, when he realized that this was George Orwell, two of whose books he ‘had read and greatly admired’, he asked what he could do to help him. ‘I have come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism,’ Orwell told him. 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 proposed that Orwell base himself in McNair’s offices and suggested he visit Madrid, Valencia and the Aragón front, where the POUM1 was stationed, ‘and then get down to writing his book’. Orwell told McNair that writing a book ‘was quite secondary and his main reason for coming was to fight against Fascism’. McNair took him to the POUM barracks, where Orwell immediately enlisted, and introduced him to Victor Alba, then a journalist who would later write a history of the POUM (see, p. 2, n. 1, above); Alba showed Orwell round Barcelona. Orwell did not know, and never knew, that two months before he arrived in Spain, the NKVD’s resident in Spain, Aleksandr Orlov, had confidently assured NKVD Headquarters, ‘The Trotskyist organization POUM can easily be liquidated’2 – by those, the Communists, whom Orwell took to be their allies in the fight against Franco.

  1. POUM, Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), was described by Orwell in Homage to Catalonia as ‘one of those dissident Communist parties which have appeared in many countries in the last few years as a result of the opposition to “Stalinism”; i.e. to the change, real or apparent, in Communist policy. It was made up partly of ex-Communists and partly of an earlier party, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Bloc. Numerically it was a small party, with not much influence outside Catalonia, and chiefly important because it contained an unusually high proportion of politically conscious members.… It did not represent any block of trade unions.’ He gives the membership as 10,000 in July 1936; 70,000 in December 1936; and 40,000 in June 1937, but warns that the figures are from POUM sources, and ‘a hostile estimate would probably divide them by four’; see pp. 180–81 [VI/202–3].

  2. Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West (1999), 95, quoting John Costello and Oleg Tsarev, Deadly Illusions (1993), 281.

  [358]

  Eileen Blair to Leonard Moore

  31 January 1937 Handwritten

  The Stores, Wallington, Near Baldock, Herts

  Dear Mr Moore,

  I enclose the signed agreement.1 I am afraid there was a little delay before your letter was forwarded to me – I got it yesterday – but when I read the agreement I was delighted, as I know my husband will be when he hears the details. I had not fully realised before how satisfactory it was; in your office the other day I was being rather single-minded.

  There is quite good news in Spain, though it comes very erratically. Eric has been created a ‘cabo’, which is I think a kind of corporal2 & which distresses him because he has to get up early to turn out the guard, but he also has a dug-out in which he can make tea. There is apparently no ‘proper’ fighting as neither side has efficient artillery or even rifles.3 He says he thinks the government forces ought to attack but are not going to. I hope no crisis will arise needing his decision as letters take from 7 to 104 days to get here.

  With many thanks,

  Yours sincerely,

  Eileen Blair

  1. The agreement was for the next three novels Orwell was to write after Keep the Aspidistra Flying (see 357).

  2. Orwell refers to his promotion in Homage to Catalonia, see p. 48 [VI/25].

  3. Orwell records that rifles were issued on their third morning in Alcubierre, Homage to Catalonia, see p. 42 [VI/16].

  4. ‘10’ is possibly ‘16.’ Eileen seems to be more concerned that a battle could affect the publication of her husband’s work than that it might endanger his life. Her objectivity, surely deceptive, might be considered in the light of that attributed to Orwell at the end of her life.

  [360]

  ‘British Author with the Militia’

  The Spanish Revolution: Bulletin of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification1 (POUM), 3 February 1937

  At the beginning of January, we received a visit in Barcelona from Eric Blair, the well-known British author, whose work is so much appreciated in all English-speaking left circles of thought. Comrade Blair came to Barcelona, and said he wanted to be of some use to the workers’ cause. In view of his literary abilities and intellectual attainments, it appeared that the most useful work he could do in Barcelona would be that of a propaganda journalist in constant communication with socialist organs of opinion in Britain. He said: ‘I have decided that I can be of most use to the workers as a fighter at the front.’ He spent exactly seven days in Barcelona, and he is now fighting with the Spanish comrades of the P.O.U.M. on the Aragón front.

  In a postcard which he sent us, he says: ‘When I have persuaded them to teach me something about the machine-gun, I hope to be drafted to t
he front line trenches.’

  On 8 March 1937, The Road to Wigan Pier was published by Victor Gollancz (see 362 ).

  1. The Spanish Revolution was published fortnightly from 10 Rambla de los Estudios, Barcelona, and presented the POUM’s case in the propaganda war being waged within the government forces. It was available in London (from the ILP and the Marxist League) and in New York, Chicago and Toronto. This issue also had a longer article, ‘Fighting Men from Britain’, and one summarizing ‘The Stalinist Position’, ‘The P.O.U.M.’s Position’ and ‘The Anarchist Position’, under the heading ‘If they are not Socialist, nor Communist, nor Marxist, What Are They?’. In addition to explaining why ILP men were fighting under the POUM banner, this and later articles reveal a tone strikingly similar to the propaganda fed people at home during World War I. Training, it was explained, lasted fifteen days, ‘and by that time they should be ready for service at the front’. The food was said to be good but it would ‘take the lads a week to get used to the drinking of wine at practically every meal’. Each man was given a packet of cigarettes a day ‘and the pay received is remarkably good, namely 10 pesetas’. Pay came as a surprise, ‘as all of our lads had volunteered to fight and had never considered the possibility of such a regular sum’. Its frequency is not mentioned. A peseta was worth about fourpence, pre-metrication (see 363, n. 5). Orwell kept copies of The Spanish Revolution among his papers until his death.

  [363]

  Eileen Blair to her mother

  22 March 1937 Handwritten

  Seccion Inglesa, 10 Rambla de los Estudios, Barcelona1