Orwell
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In December 1938 Orwell told Cyril Connolly why he disliked Morocco: “[It] seems to me a beastly dull country, no forests and literally no wild animals, and the people anywhere near a big town utterly debauched by the tourist racket and their poverty combined, which turn them into a race of beggars and curio-sellers.” His essay “Marrakech” contains a series of vivid impressions: brutalized donkeys, fly-blown funerals, starving Arabs, squalid Jews, hopeless farmers, aged porters and wretched soldiers. These brief scenes illuminate the desperate economic conditions of the French colony and reinforce his attack on colonialism, which reduces its subjects to moral, social and political insignificance: “when you see how people live, and still more how easily they die, it is always difficult to believe you are walking among human beings…. People with brown skins are next door to invisible” to the European colonizers, who see them not as individuals but as part of the mass.
II
At the beginning of his career, Orwell tried unsuccessfully to get a commission to translate Zola's novels. Burmese Days and Animal Farm were translated into French in his lifetime, but (at least in the beginning) never sold well. The translation of Homage to Catalonia did not appear until after his death, in 1955. When Animal Farm, his first great success, was published in England, Orwell asked his editor to send copies to the leading French writers: André Gide (who'd criticized the Soviet Union in Return from the USSR), François Mauriac (who'd made Orwell think about the limitations of Catholic novelists), Julien Green (an American-born, Parisian-raised novelist who wrote in French), André Malraux (a brilliant writer who'd fought for the loyalists in Spain), and the Existentialists—Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus (the novelist and courageous editor of the wartime resistance newspaper Combat).
Orwell, extremely well read in French literature, reviewed books by and about twenty French authors, and made many shrewd observations. Reviewing a book on the self-destructive nineteenth-century poet Charles Baudelaire, Orwell emphasized the paradoxical, even satanic quality of his religious beliefs: “Spiritually the Christian cosmos suited him, though as a rule he preferred to turn it upside down…. [It was] natural enough at a time when religious belief was decaying, and it did not incapacitate Baudelaire as a poet; on the contrary, it was the making of him.” He also emphasized decay when criticizing the frustrating obscurity of the poet Stéphane Mallarmé: “there is something wrong somewhere when poets of obvious talent write poems that are virtually unintelligible…. Artistic obscurity, so common this last seventy years, is only one of the morbid growths of our decaying civilization.”
Orwell often placed French writers in their economic and political context. Julian Green's autobiography recorded “the twilight of the aesthetic age, the last gasp of the cultivated second-generation rentier.” Though passionate about his Left-wing political beliefs, he nevertheless was able to admire, on aesthetic grounds, Fascist writers like Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose politics he abhorred. The purpose of Céline's horrific Voyage to the End of the Night, he wrote, was “to protest against the horror and meaninglessness of modern life—actually, indeed, of life. It is [like the novels of Henry Miller] a cry of unbearable disgust, a voice from the cesspool.”
Orwell's own style was lucid and direct, and he valued vigor and clarity in English prose. The main stylistic fault of contemporary French writers, he felt, was “a tendency towards rhetoric—that is, a tendency to say everything at enormous length and at once forcibly and vaguely.” Sartre, who gave the impression “of being one of those [cerebral] writers who set on paper the process instead of the results of thought,” embodied this rhetorical tendency and was, Orwell always maintained, “a bag of wind.”
In 1945 Orwell became a war correspondent for the London Observer and the Manchester Evening News. Between February and May he sent eighteen dispatches about the effect of war on the civilian population in liberated Paris as well as in occupied Germany and Austria. Orwell did not witness the great events of the war: the frontline battles, the liberation of the extermination camps and (later on) the war-crimes trials. He did see the desperate plight of French civilians and the massive destruction of Germany, but his curiously flat, lifeless and impersonal cables disappointed the Observer's editor, David Astor. Orwell may have been too horrified to comprehend and capture conditions during the last months of the war in France, and needed more time to absorb the impact of what he'd seen.
Orwell spent most of his time at the Hôtel Scribe in Paris, was struck by the tribe of American reporters with their glittering uniforms and stupendous salaries, and met a number of eminent writers. Harold Acton, the Old Etonian and art historian, “was impressed by his mournful dignity…. He mentioned his lung trouble as if it were something to be ashamed of.” Orwell also had a strong effect on another Old Etonian, the Oxford philosophy don A. J. Ayer, who was in Paris in the spring of 1945. “His moral integrity made him hard upon himself and sometimes harsh in his judgement of other people,” Ayer wrote, “but he was no enemy to pleasure. He appreciated good food and drink, enjoyed gossip, and when not oppressed by ill-health was very good company.”
Orwell met Ernest Hemingway at the Ritz when he came “to borrow a pistol because ‘They’ were after him…. He was very gaunt and looked in bad shape and [Hemingway] asked him if he would not stay and eat. But he had to go…. The pistol was all he needed. We asked about a few mutual friends and he left.” Orwell, about to publish Animal Farm, his satire on the Soviet Union, had good reason to fear the Russians who'd hunted him in Spain and still considered him a dangerous enemy. When the Germans were defeated and the Communists emerged from the underground, a lot of people were shot. Hemingway's Colt .32 helped protect him from assassins.
Orwell also had some contact with French writers who shared his political views and had worked in the Resistance during the war. He arranged to have lunch with Albert Camus at the Deux Magots, but he was even more ill than Orwell and couldn't come. Both Orwell and Camus suffered from tuberculosis, struggled continuously against pain and knew their days were numbered. Orwell did meet André Malraux, an advisor to General Charles de Gaulle, and found him very friendly. Orwell wanted Malraux to write an introduction to the French edition of Homage to Catalonia, and Malraux planned to write one but never did. Ayer, in a suggestive comparison, described their political affinity: “Both were individualists, and each of them combined Left-wing sympathies with the conservative values of patriotism, self-reliance and discipline in action. I suppose that Orwell was the more puritanical, though in personal relations neither priggish nor arrogant, perhaps also the more romantic and the more keenly aware that power corrupts. Malraux seems to have been more of an adventurer. It is to their credit that [Karl] Marx would have seen them both as sentimental socialists.”
Anti-Communist as well as anti-Fascist, Orwell was violently opposed to the puppet Vichy government that was set up by the Germans during their occupation of France in World War II. He admired the democratic principles of liberty, equality and fraternity that were embodied in the French Revolution of 1789; and felt that the Vichy government, led by Marshal Philippe Pétain (whom he'd seen at Foch's funeral), was “consciously bent on destroying” these cherished beliefs. Using the horrific symbol of cruelty in Nineteen Eighty-Four, he thought that in postwar France “all kinds of petty rats—police officials, penny-a-lining journalists, women who have slept with German soldiers—are hunted down while almost without exception the big rats escape.” Disgusted by the crude attacks on the Left in the postwar French press, he noted that enemies of the Jewish-Socialist prewar Prime Minister “once published a cartoon showing Léon Blum in bed with his own sister.” He respected the integrity of the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, “one of the tiny handful of prominent Catholics who [unlike Céline and other literary collaborators] kept their heads and refused to make propaganda for Fascism.”
Orwell condemned France for putting hundreds of thousands of Spaniards, who had fled from General Fran
cisco Franco's regime after their defeat in the Spanish Civil War, behind barbed wire in southwest France. And he was sickened when France, which in the French Revolution had abolished all social restrictions against Jews, cooperated with the Nazi occupiers and helped deport their own Jewish citizens to extermination camps in Eastern Europe. In 1945, alluding to the false charges against Captain Alfred Dreyfus that had aroused furious anti-Semitic feelings at the turn of the century, Orwell warned his own countrymen that with the revival of nationalism in the usually more tolerant England, “the kind of anti-Semitism which flourished among the anti-Dreyfusards in France, and which Chesterton and [Hilaire] Belloc tried to import into this country, might get a foothold.”
Orwell felt the myth of a kindly Joseph Stalin and a beneficent Soviet Union (which had been exposed by the former Communist André Gide) was weaker in France, despite the powerful French Communist Party, than in England. But he feared a drift to the extreme Left and the possibility of a Communist government in postwar France. Yet after the British general election in November 1945, in which the Labour Party defeated Churchill's Conservatives, Paris seemed “less revolutionary, more pre-1939 in outlook, even than London.”
In December 1945 Orwell shrewdly predicted that postwar France would have “Slow economic recovery, intellectual stagnation. Growth in the power of the Catholics as against the other factions. Increasing estrangement between Socialists and Communists. All-round growth of xenophobia. The one great political issue will be the question of the Western Bloc, but the forces will be so perfectly balanced that no decision will be reached.” The Western Bloc became NATO, the North Atlantic military alliance against the Soviet bloc, which France joined in 1949. The previous year Orwell told his friend David Astor: “I think you were right after all about de Gaulle being a serious figure. I suppose at need we shall have to back the swine up rather than have a Communist France.”
Orwell had always admired France and its literature, and drew upon his fluent French and intimate knowledge of French culture in his life as a political journalist. In the 1930s and 1940s he became far more critical. Though opposed to colonialism, he thought French rule in Morocco worse than English rule in Burma. He condemned the self-defeating neutrality of both France and England in the Spanish Civil War and their appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s. Orwell loathed both the wartime pro-Nazi Vichy regime and the postwar Communists. Like most Britons, he felt that England had saved France from defeat in two world wars and resented the postwar grandiosity of General de Gaulle. Though he did not enjoy the same literary life as Hemingway and the other American expatriates in the 1920s, his years in Paris were just as crucial and, eventually, as liberating. In Down and Out in Paris and London he compared French and English life and character, and played off one against the other. Above all his book describes the development of a young man and artist, committed to an intellectual life that would be always connected to political realities. Life in Paris reinforced his English identity, yet gave him an artistic start he had not found in Burma or England. His experience in France, grafted on to his eccentric English character, provided a unique perspective and inspired his vision of European politics.
SIX
“AN AFFIRMING FLAME”
Homage to Catalonia
I sent my first essays on Orwell to the English novelist John Wain, who had written most perceptively about him, and was immensely gratified by Wain's letters of encouragement and (when we met in Oxford) by his friendship. I later met Georges Kopp's son and found out much more about Orwell's military hero. This essay placed Homage, a focal point in his literary career, in its political and literary context. It showed that its genre is war memoir; that its great theme is comradeship; and that it expressed Orwell's deep-rooted need to be, as John Donne wrote, “involved in mankind.” It's highly ironic that his best book sold only six hundred copies in his lifetime and if the bullet that pierced his throat had had a slightly different trajectory, he would never have written Homage or his political satires of the 1940s. It's worth noting, as Orwell would say, that the only people who still believe in Marxism are North Koreans, Cubans and fraudulent but prosperous English professors.
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair
Show an affirming flame.
W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”
In his valuable essay, “Orwell in Perspective,” John Wain states that much of the criticism on Orwell is useless or misdirected because it “started out from the wrong end. It is impossible to criticize an author's work adequately until you have understood what kind of books he was writing.”1 Homage to Catalonia (1938), which contains autobiography, military history, political analysis and propaganda, is problematical in this respect and seems a mixture of “kinds.” The structure of the book is determined by Orwell's motivations and psychological needs as well as by the pattern of historical events. This essay attempts to place it in perspective in two ways: according to its genre and its relation to Orwell's other books. I believe its genre is war memoir and its model those classic accounts of the Great War, narrated from the victim's viewpoint, which Orwell discusses in “Inside the Whale.” Critics have frequently noted that Orwell's war experience in Spain provided the original impetus for his late political satires. If Homage portrays the revolution, Animal Farm describes the “revolution betrayed” and Nineteen Eighty-Four the “triumph of reaction.” What has not been observed, however, is that Homage is closely related to his early life and personal narratives and that its central theme of comradeship and human solidarity (the main support of the victim in war) is an expression of his intense need to be accepted by and “involved in mankind”—a need that was generated by his experiences in St. Cyprian's and Eton, in the colonial service, with Parisian plongeurs, London paupers and Wigan miners. Homage portrays not only an eyewitness account of what really happened in Spain, but also the story of a man's growth in personal and political awareness. The central tension between politics and war, reflection and action, disenchantment and idealism, creates the dominant form of Homage and reflects the poignant opposition of victimization and comradeship.
In “Why I Write,” Orwell states that “Homage to Catalonia is, of course, a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.”2 Though critics find the political chapters merely ephemeral and obstructive, Orwell's evaluation is reliable and his creative instinct sound. The form of the book, which he said was “the best I have written,” is finely wrought.
The structure of Homage is based on two contrasts. First, the descriptions of combat on the Aragon front are contrasted to Orwell's three visits to Barcelona in December, April and June. Second, at each visit the revolution has rapidly deteriorated, so that the radically reversed political conditions provide an increasingly dramatic and painfully ironic reflection on his previous stay. Orwell's two apparently distinct purposes converge and unify as the four dominant events of the book reveal that the military action at the front is negated by the political events in Barcelona. The parapet attack (chapter 7) and Orwell's wound (chapter 12) climax his two visits to the front; the fighting around the Café Moka (chapter 10) and his attempt to rescue Kopp (chapter 14) climax his two returns to Barcelona.
The book opens in December 1936 as Orwell enlists in the militia and experiences for the first time the “special atmosphere” of revolutionary spirit in Barcelona.3 After the briefest and most ineffectual “training,” he is sent to the front in early January and remains there until the parapet attack. He returns to Barcelona on April 26 to find the Civil War has become triangular, with the Communists and Socialists fighting each other as well as the Fascists, and spends most of his leave involved in street fighting for the Socialists. He returns to the front on May 10, disillusioned though awakened, and is shot through
the throat ten days later. He spends the next month first in various hospitals and then seeking his discharge papers, and returns to Barcelona for the last time on June 20 to discover his militia-party outlawed and his life in danger. Though pursued by the police, he attempts to rescue Kopp and barely escapes to France on June 23.
The political chapters, like chapter 8 and the end of chapter 14, are reflective and establish an effective contrast to the action. These chapters serve as interludes which place Orwell's experiences in perspective: chapter 5 separates the five chapters on the Aragon front (chapters 2–4, 6–7) and explains the stalemate that has been described in the earlier chapters (the Loyalist armies are divided and cannot mount and sustain an offensive); chapter 11 explains the reasons for the street fighting narrated in the previous chapter. Though the subject of Homage is war, Orwell insists “it could be quite impossible to write about the Spanish War from a purely military angle. It was above all things a political war.”4 The vital connection between personal narration and political reporting of the war is skillfully emphasized by the description of his retreat from the parapet and retreat from the Hotel Continental, where the police are searching for him. Both events are narrated in brief staccato dialogue: the repetition of a curt but urgent command and a puzzled response by Orwell—“Get out of it!” / “Why?” (97) and “Get out of here at once!” / “What?” (204)—are followed by his halting movement in the ordered direction.
Like the structure, the atmosphere of Homage is compounded of contrasts and antitheses. In its political and military aspects it resembles Nostromo, in which history is nothing more than “stories of political outrage; friends, relatives, ruined, imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously executed in ferocious proscriptions…. Oppression, inefficiency, fatuous methods, treachery, and savage brutality [ruled].”5 As Bernanos writes of his painful Civil War experiences: “The tragedy of Spain is a foretaste of the tragedy of the universe. It is the shattering proof of the unhappy condition of men of good will in modern society, which little by little eliminates them, as a by-product that can be turned to no good account.”6