Homage to Catalonia
Secker and Warburg (London) | |
Publication date | April 1938 |
---|---|
Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Pages | 368 (paperback) 248 (hardback) |
Preceded by | The Road to Wigan Pier |
Followed by | Coming Up for Air |
Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations fighting in the Spanish Civil War for the POUM militia of the Republican army.
Published in 1938 (about a year before the war ended) with little commercial success, it gained more attention in the 1950s following the success of Orwell's better-known works Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Covering the period between December 1936 and June 1937, Orwell recounts Catalonia's revolutionary fervor during his training in Barcelona, his boredom on the front lines in Aragon, his involvement in the interfactional May Days conflict back in Barcelona on leave, his getting shot in the throat back on the front lines, and his escape to France after the POUM was declared an illegal organization.
The war was one of the defining events of his political outlook and a significant part of what led him to write in 1946, "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it."[1]
Background
Historical context
The Republican side, which viewed the Nationalists as fascists, was made up of several factions including socialists, anarchists, and communists. There was infighting between these factions, which Orwell details in his chapters on the May Days of Barcelona.
Biographical context
Joining the war
Orwell left for Spain just before Christmas 1936, shortly after submitting The Road to Wigan Pier for publication, the first book in which he explicitly espouses socialism.
Within the first few pages of Homage to Catalonia, Orwell writes, "I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do." However, it has been suggested that Orwell intended all along to enlist.[2]
Orwell had been told that he would not be permitted to enter Spain without some supporting documents from a British left-wing organisation, so he sought the assistance of the
Upon arriving in Spain, Orwell is reported to have told McNair that he had come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism.
By Orwell's own admission, it was somewhat by chance that he joined the POUM: "I knew that I was serving in something called the POUM. (I had only joined the POUM militia rather than any other because I happened to arrive in Barcelona with ILP papers), but I did not realize that there were serious differences between the political parties."[6] He later notes, "As far as my purely personal preferences went I would have liked to join the Anarchists." He also nearly joined Communist International's International Column midway through his tour because he thought they were likeliest to send him to Madrid, where he wanted to join the action.
Writing
Orwell wrote diaries, made press-cuttings, and took photographs during his time in Spain, but they were all stolen before he left. In May 1937, he wrote the publisher of his previous books saying, "I greatly hope I come out of this alive if only to write a book about it."[7] According to his eventual publisher, "Homage was begun in February [1937] in the trenches, written on scraps, the backs of envelopes, toilet paper. The written material was sent to Barcelona to McNair's office, where his wife Eileen Blair, working as a volunteer, typed it out section by section. Slowly it grew into a sizable parcel. McNair kept it in his own room."[8]
Upon escaping across the French border in June 1937, he stopped at the first post office available to telegram the National Statesman, asking if it would like a first-hand article. The offer was accepted but the article, "Eyewitness in Barcelona",[9] was rejected by editor Kingsley Martin on grounds that his writing "could cause trouble"[10][11][12] (it was picked up by Controversy). In the months after leaving Spain, Orwell wrote a number of essays on the war, notably "Spilling the Spanish Beans" and a praiseful review of Franz Borkenau's The Spanish Cockpit.
Writing from his cottage at Wallington, Hertfordshire, he finished around New Year's Day 1938.[13][5]
Publication
The first edition was published in the United Kingdom in April 1938 by
The book was not published in the United States until February 1952, with a preface by Lionel Trilling.
The only translation published in Orwell's lifetime was into Italian, in December 1948.[16] A French translation by Yvonne Davet—with whom Orwell corresponded, commenting on her translation and providing explanatory notes—in 1938–39, was not published until 1955, five years after Orwell's death.[17][18][19]
Per Orwell's wishes, the original chapters 5 and 11 were turned into appendices in some later editions. In 1986,
Chapter summaries
The appendices in this summary correspond to chapters 5 and 11 in editions that do not include appendices. Orwell felt these chapters, as journalistic accounts of the political situation in Spain, were out of place in the midst of the narrative and should be moved so that readers could ignore them if they wished.
Chapter one
Orwell describes the atmosphere of Barcelona in December 1936. "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
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
Chapter three
In the hills around Zaragoza, Orwell experiences 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".[22]
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"),[22] 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 Zaragoza. "Perhaps the best of the bunch was Bob Smillie—the grandson of
Chapter five (orig. ch. 6)
Orwell complains that on the eastern side of Huesca, where he was stationed, nothing ever seemed to happen—except the onslaught of spring, and, with it,
Chapter six (orig. ch. 7)
Orwell takes part in a "holding attack" on Huesca, designed to draw the Nationalist troops away from an Anarchist attack on "the Jaca road." He suspects two of the bombs he threw may have killed their targets, but he cannot be sure. They capture the position and pull back with captured rifles and ammunition, but Orwell laments that they fled too hurriedly to bring back a telescope they had discovered, which Orwell sees as more useful than any weapons.
Chapter seven (orig. ch. 8)
Orwell shares 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."[26] 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 26 April 1937. "And after that the trouble began."
Chapter eight (orig. ch. 9)
Orwell details noteworthy changes in the social and political atmosphere of Barcelona when he returns after 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 Unión General de Trabajadores (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."[27]
Chapter nine (orig. ch. 10)
Orwell relates his involvement in the "May Days"' Barcelona street fighting that began on 3 May when the
Chapter ten (orig. ch. 12)
Orwell speculates 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,[29] 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 (orig. ch. 13)
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 out from his wife 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."[30] While his wife went back to the hotel, he sleeps that night in the ruins of a church; he cannot go back to his hotel because of the danger of arrest.
Chapter twelve (orig. ch. 14)
This chapter describes his visits accompanied by his wife 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 (orig. ch. 5)
Orwell explains the divisions within the Republican side: "On the one side the CNT-FAI, the POUM, and a section of the Socialists, standing for workers' control: on the other side the Right-wing Socialists, Liberals, and Communists, standing for centralized government and a militarized army."[32] He also writes: "One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right."[33]
Appendix two (orig. ch. 11)
An attempt to dispel some of the myths in the foreign press at the time (mostly the pro-Communist press) about the "May Days", the street fighting that took place in
Reception
Sales
Homage to Catalonia was initially commercially unsuccessful, selling only 683 copies in its first 6 months. By the time of Orwell's death in 1950, its initial print run of 1,500 copies had still not all sold.[8] Homage to Catalonia re-emerged in the 1950s, following on the success of Orwell's later books.[14]
Reviews
Contemporary
Contemporary reviews of the book were mixed.
Notably positive reviews came from
Hostile notices came from The Tablet, where a 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, "the first misrepresenting what Orwell had said and the latter attacking the POUM, but never mentioning the book".[37]
Later
The book was praised by Noam Chomsky in 1969.[38] Raymond Carr praised Orwell in 1971 for being "determined to set down the truth as he saw it."[39]
In his 1971 memoir,
Aftermath
Within weeks of leaving Spain, a deposition (discovered in 1989
Georges Kopp, deemed "quite likely" shot in the book's final chapter, was released in December 1938.
Barcelona fell to Franco's forces on 26 January 1939,[44] and on 1 April 1939, the last of the Republican forces surrendered.[45]
Effect on Orwell
Health
Orwell never knew the source of his tuberculosis, from complications of which he died in 1950. However, in 2018, researchers studying bacteria on his letters announced that there was a "very high probability" that Orwell contracted the disease in a Spanish hospital.[46]
Politics
Orwell reflected that he "had felt what socialism could be like"[47] and, according to biographer Gordon Bowker, "Orwell never did abandon his socialism: if anything, his Spanish experience strengthened it."[48] In a letter to Cyril Connolly, written on 8 June 1937, Orwell said, "At last [I] really believe in Socialism, which I never did before".[49] A decade later he wrote: "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it."[50]
Orwell's experiences, culminating in his and his wife
After reviewing Koestler's bestselling Darkness at Noon, Orwell decided that fiction was the best way to describe totalitarianism. He soon wrote Animal Farm, "his scintillating 1944 satire on Stalinism".[51][52]
Works inspired by the book
Orwell himself went on to write a poem about the Italian militiaman he described in the book's opening pages. The poem was included in Orwell's 1942 essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War", published in New Road in 1943.[55] The closing phrase of the poem, "No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit", was later taken by George Woodcock for the title of his Governor General's Award-winning critical study of Orwell and his work, The Crystal Spirit (1966).[56]
In 1995 Ken Loach released the film Land and Freedom, heavily inspired by Homage to Catalonia.[57]
Homage to Catalonia influenced
See also
- Anarchist Catalonia
- Bibliography of George Orwell
- ILP Contingent described in Homage to Catalonia
- Les grands cimetières sous la lune
- Spanish Revolution
- William Herrick 'an American Orwell', also disillusioned by Stalinism in Spain
References
- ^ "Why I Write | The Orwell Foundation". orwellfoundation.com. 3 June 2011. Archived from the original on 21 October 2018. Retrieved 16 October 2021.
- ^ "George Orwell's Prelude in Spain". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 4 October 2021. Retrieved 16 October 2021.
- ^ Stansky, Peter; Abrahams, William. Orwell: The Transformation. p. 200.
- ISBN 978-0-141-39302-5.
- ^ a b c Dag, O. "Bernard Crick: George Orwell: A Life -- Chapters 7 to 12". orwell.ru. Archived from the original on 17 October 2021. Retrieved 16 October 2021.
- ^ George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. pp. 197–198.
- ^ "George Orwell to Victor Gollancz, 9 May 1937 | The Orwell Foundation". orwellfoundation.com. 30 January 2011. Archived from the original on 17 October 2021. Retrieved 17 October 2021.
- ^ a b Warburg, Fredric (17 August 2019). An Occupation For Gentlemen. Plunkett Lake Press. Archived from the original on 16 March 2022. Retrieved 17 October 2021.
- ^ Orwell, George. "Eyewitness in Barcelona". Workers' Liberty. Retrieved 14 August 2023.
- ^ "The Orwell wars". New Statesman. 10 June 2021. Archived from the original on 17 October 2021. Retrieved 16 October 2021.
- ^ a b c "Gordon Bowker: The Road to Morocco | The Orwell Foundation". orwellfoundation.com. 20 October 2010. Archived from the original on 17 October 2021. Retrieved 16 October 2021.
- ^ ISBN 978-0-87140-462-6.
- ^ Newsinger, John (Spring 1994). "Orwell and the Spanish Revolution". International Socialism Journal (62). Archivedfrom the original on 17 October 2018. Retrieved 23 February 2009.
- ^ ISSN 0024-2160. Retrieved 17 October 2021.
- ^ Bowker, p. 230.
- ^ Omaggio alla Catalogna, translated by Giorgio Monicelli (Mondadori, Verona, December 1948), The Lost Orwell, p. 124.
- ISBN 0-436-20538-6.
- ^ ISSN 1475-3820 – via Taylor & Francis.
- ^ a b Orwell in Spain. p. 6. Archived from the original on 17 October 2021. Retrieved 17 October 2021.
- ^ George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. p. 8.
- ISBN 978-0-285-63825-9.
- ^ a b George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. p. 29.
- ^ George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. p. 41.
- ^ George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. p. 48.
- ^ George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. p. 59.
- ^ George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. pp. 87–88.
- ^ George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. p. 103.
- ^ George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. p. 135.
- ^ "Harry Milton – The Man Who Saved Orwell" Archived 24 February 2009 at the Wayback Machine The Hoover Institute. Retrieved 23 December 2008.
- ^ George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. p. 170.
- ISBN 1-85725-214-4.
- ^ George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. p. 212.
- Manchester Guardian... which is the only one that leaves me with an increased respect for its honesty". George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. p. 215.
- ^ a b George Orwell Homage to Catalonia. Penguin Books 2013. p. 246.
- ^ Daily Worker, 21 May 1938, reproduced in Valentine Cunningham (ed.), Spanish Front: Writers on the Civil War, Oxford, 1986, pp. 304–05.
- ISBN 978-0-349-11551-1.
- ^ Shelden, pp. 320–21.
- ^ American Power and the New Mandarins, p. 117.
- ISBN 0-297-00479-4.
- ISBN 978-0-684-12536-7. Archivedfrom the original on 16 March 2022. Retrieved 17 October 2021.
- ^ a b Low, Robert (19 November 1989). "1937 DOCUMENT REVEALS DANGERS ORWELL FACED IN SPANISH CIVIL WAR". Deseret News. Archived from the original on 17 October 2021. Retrieved 17 October 2021.
- ISBN 978-0-436-20377-0. Archivedfrom the original on 16 March 2022. Retrieved 17 October 2021.
- ^ Facing Unpleasant Facts, pp. 31, 224.
- ^ "Barcelona and the Spanish civil war". The Observer. 22 July 2012. p. 58. Archived from the original on 2 February 2017. Retrieved 17 December 2016.
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- ^ "Traces on George Orwell letter suggest he caught TB from Spanish hospital". The Guardian. 31 July 2018. Archived from the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 17 October 2021.
- ^ The World of George Orwell, p.72 Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971
- ISBN 978-0349115511.
- ISBN 978-81-7156-435-4. Archivedfrom the original on 1 November 2021. Retrieved 1 November 2021.
- ISBN 978-0-521-67507-9. Archivedfrom the original on 21 January 2021. Retrieved 1 January 2021.
- ^ Foot, Paul, Articles of Resistance, p. 92.
- Dalrymple, William. "Novel explosives of the Cold War". The Spectator. Archived from the original on 26 August 2019. Alt URL Archived 27 August 2019 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ "Big Brother is watching you, George Orwell". The Guardian. 15 June 2008. Archived from the original on 19 October 2021. Retrieved 17 October 2021.
- ^ "George Orwell ya tiene plaza" (PDF). Archived (PDF) from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 17 October 2021.
- ^ "The Crystal Spirit" Archived 7 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine George Orwell Novels. Retrieved 19 August 2013.
- ^ Hiebert, Matt. "In Canada and Abroad: The Diverse Publishing Career of George Woodcock". Archived 19 August 2013 at archive.today Retrieved 19 August 2013.
- ^ "Orwell's Homage to Catalonia revisited". The Volunteer. 15 September 2013. Archived from the original on 17 October 2021. Retrieved 17 October 2021.
- from the original on 31 October 2021. Retrieved 1 November 2021.
Further reading
- Caballero Aceituno, Yolanda (2005). "Homage to Catalonia revisited. From Vulnerability to resistance". Odisea: Revista de Estudios Ingleses (6). ISSN 1578-3820.
- Cunningham, Valentine (1987). "Homage to Catalonia revisited: remembering and misremembering the Spanish civil war". Revue belge de Philologie et d'Histoire. 65 (3): 501–514.
- Marco, Josep (2021). "Orwell's Homage to Catalonia in Catalan and Spanish translation". Perspectives. 29 (1): 141–155. .
- Martín Moruno, Dolores (2011). "Revisiting Spanish Memory: George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia". Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences. 3 (1): 34–56. ISSN 1944-1088.
- Orozco, Lourdes (2007). "Performing the Spanish Civil War in the Catalan Stage: Homage to Catalonia". Gestos. 22 (44): 55–67.
- Phillips, Bill (2009). "Constructing Catalonia". Coolabah. 3: 199–206. ISSN 1988-5946.
External links
- Homage to Catalonia at Faded Page (Canada)
- 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.
- BBC Arena Homage to Catalonia on YouTube