Orwell in Spain

by George Orwell

  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.

  1. This letter and that dated 26 November 1938 (505) were donated by Doran’s widow, Mrs Bertha Doran, to Waverley Secondary School, Drumchapel, Glasgow, in December 1974. They are reproduced here with her kind permission. She and Dr James D. Young supplied details of Doran’s life. Charles Doran (1894–1974) was born in Dublin and moved to Glasgow in 1915. After serving in World War I, he became active in Guy Aldred’s Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation. He joined the ILP in the early 1930s and served with Orwell in the POUM in Spain in 1937. They exchanged letters in 1938–9, but no others have been traced. Doran opposed World War II and joined a small anarchist group led by Willie MacDougall that engaged in anti-militarist and revolutionary socialist propaganda throughout the war. He also contributed to MacDougall’s newspaper, the Pioneer News. In 1983 Mrs Doran told Dr Young that her late husband was impressed by Orwell’s modesty and sincerity. ‘I remember Charlie saying that Orwell was not an argumentative sort of person. He [Charlie] might voice an opinion about something, hoping to provoke Orwell into agreeing or disagreeing, but Orwell would just say: “You might be right, Doran!” Orwell at that time had not read Marx.’ Alex Zwerdling, in Orwell and the Left (1974, 20), states that Orwell’s work shows he had read Marx with care and understanding; he quotes from Richard Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of Victory (1961), who tells how Orwell astonished everyone at the Adelphi Summer School, 1936, by his knowledge of Marx (147). See Crick, 613, n. 49. By the mid-1940s, according to Mrs Doran, ‘Charlie classed him [Orwell] as a rebel – not a revolutionary – who was dissatisfied with the Establishment, while remaining part of it’ (Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 51, part 1, April 1986, 15–17). See pp. 25–7, above, for charges against Doran.

  2. Marceau Pivert contributed to Controversy; see ‘Eye-Witness in Barcelona’, n. 1, above.

  3. Harry Milton, the only American in Orwell’s section. See Eileen Blair’s letter to John McNair, 29 July 1937, n. 11, above. He is sometimes referred to as Mike Milton.

  4. The reference to appendicitis is to the supposed cause of death of Bob Smillie. Orwell gives an account of Smillie’s death in Homage to Catalonia, pp.155–6 [VI/170–71]. He assumed that Smillie had been shot in prison, but it was later stated that he had died of appendicitis. The local ILP representative, David Murray, was refused permission to see Smillie’s body, which ‘may have been due to pure spite’. Orwell concludes: ‘Smillie’s death is not a thing I can easily forgive. Here was this brave and gifted boy, who had thrown up his career at Glasgow University in order to come and fight against Fascism, and who, as I saw for myself, had done his job at the front with faultless courage and willingness; and all they could find to do with him was to fling him into jail and let him die like a neglected animal.’ For a full consideration of the controversy over Smillie’s death, see Tom Buchanan, ‘The Death of Bob Smillie, the Spanish Civil War, and the Eclipse of the Independent Labour Party’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 435–61.

  5. Stafford Cottman (1918–99) had been a clerk in local government before he joined the ILP contingent in Spain. He was Orwell’s youngest colleague and escaped with him from Spain. Cottman’s account of the journey is given in Remembering Orwell, 95–6; he was an adviser on Ken Loach’s film Land and Freedom. He remained a loyal friend of Orwell’s. See also Orwell Remembered, 148–55, for a transcript of an interview by him in a BBC Arena programme. A letter from Orwell to Cottman for 25 April 1946, when Cottman was serving in the RAF, survives (2984). He served as a rear gunner in Bomber Command and was fortunately invalided out of active duty the day before his bomber was shot down over Germany.

  6. Young Communist League.

  [386A]

  Unpublished Response to Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War

  [3–6 August 1937] Typewritten copy

  In June 1937, Left Review solicited reactions of writers to the Spanish Civil War. A questionnaire, prefaced by an appeal to writers to take sides, ‘For it is impossible any longer to take no side’, was sent out by Nancy Cunard. 1 The appeal was issued over the names of twelve writers, who included Louis Aragon, W. H. Auden, Heinrich Mann, Ivor Montagu, Stephen Spender, Tristan Tzara and Nancy Cunard (who processed the replies). Lawrence & Wishart published the result as a pamphlet, Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, in December 1937. Authors were asked, ‘Are you for, or against, the legal Government and People of Republican Spain? Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism?’ Authors were asked to answer in half a dozen lines. Although many wrote briefly (Samuel Beckett especially so, turning three words into one: ‘¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!’, and Rose Macaulay in two words, ‘AGAINST FRANCO’), many wrote more fully. Orwell’s letter to Nancy Cunard was believed to have been lost. On 18 March 1994, the New Statesman published an article by Andy Croft, ‘The Awkward Squaddie’, which included part of Orwell’s reply to Nancy Cunard; it had been written on the back of the appeal. She typed a copy (or had a copy typed) of Orwell’s reply and sent it to the editor of Left Review, Randall Swingler, among whose papers it was found by Andy Croft, together with a covering letter from Nancy Cunard to Swingler. The copy of Orwell’s letter is headed ‘Letter received, addressed to me, at Paris address, Aug 6. 1937’; it is not clear whether the 6 August is the date Orwell sent his letter or the date of its receipt. In his article, Croft correctly sets the context of this letter between the publication of the two parts of ‘Spilling the Spanish Beans’, 29 July and 2 September 1937 (see above). But there is a more specific, and more significant, context, revealed by the letters published here. Orwell was desperately anxious about the fate of his former colleagues rotting in jails in Spain as a result of the ‘reign of terror’ to which he refers in his letter to Nancy Cunard. For a much fuller note see XI/386A.

  Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden and Spender, I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting, I have a bullet-hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody. Moreover, I know what is happening and has been happening on the Government side for months past, i.e. that Fascism is being riveted on the Spanish workers under the pretext of resisting Fascism; also that since May a reign of terror has been proceeding and all the jails and any place that will serve as a jail are crammed with prisoners who are not only imprisoned without trial but are half-starved, beaten and insulted. I dare say you know it too, though God knows anyone who could write the stuff overleaf would be fool enough to believe anything, even the war-news in the Daily Worker. But the chances are that you – whoever you are who keep sending me this thing – have money and are well-informed; so no doubt you know something about the inner history of the war and have deliberately joined in the defence of ‘democracy’ (i.e. capitalism) racket in order to aid in crushing the Spanish working class and thus indirectly defend your dirty little dividends.

  This is more than 6 lines, but if I did compress what I know and think about the Spanish War into 6 lines you wouldn’t print it. You wouldn’t have the guts.

  By the way, tell your pansy friend Spender2 that I am preserving specimens of his war-heroics and that when the time comes when he squirms for shame at having written it, as the people who wrote the war-propaganda in the Great War are squirming now, I shall rub it in good and hard.

  1. Nancy Cunard (1896–1965) was the daughter of the wealthy shipping magnate who gave his name to the Cunard line; hence the reference in Orwell’s letter to her of defending ‘your dirty little dividends’. She wrote poetry and literary reminiscences and devoted herself to socialist i
ssues and the cause and arts of the blacks.

  2. Stephen Spender (1909–95; Kt., 1993), poet, novelist, dramatist, critic and translator. He edited Horizon with Cyril Connolly, 1940–41, and was a co-editor of Encounter, 1953–65, remaining on the editorial board until 1967, when it was discovered that some of the money to launch Encounter had been provided by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Orwell counted Spender among parlour Bolsheviks and ‘fashionable successful persons’, whom he castigated from time to time, see Crick, 351. They later became friends and, on 15? April 1938, Orwell wrote Spender an explanation of how he changed his attitude after meeting him (435).

  [397]

  To Geoffrey Gorer

  15 September 1937

  The Stores, Wallington, Near Baldock, Herts

  Dear Geoffrey,1

  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 Communists 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 Maxton2 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.

  I should like to meet Edith Sitwell3 very much, some time when I am in town. It surprised me very much to learn that she had heard of me and liked my books. I don’t know that I ever cared much for her poems, but I liked very much her life of Pope.

  Try and come down here some time. I hope your sprue4 is gone.

  Yours

  Eric

  1. Geoffrey Gorer (1905–85), social anthropologist and author of many books, including Africa Dances (1935), The American People (rev. edn 1964) and Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain (1965). On 16 July 1935 he wrote to Orwell about Burmese Days: ‘It is difficult to praise without being impertinent; it seems to me you have done a necessary and important piece of work as well as it could be done.’ They met and remained lifelong friends.

  2. James Maxton (1885–1946), Independent Labour MP, 1922–46; Chairman of the ILP, 1926–31, 1934–9. See his official biography by John McNair, The Beloved Rebel (1955).

  3. Edith Sitwell (1887–1964; DBE, 1954), poet and literary personality. Her first book of poems was published at her own expense in 1915, and she continued to write throughout her life. She achieved lasting and widespread recognition for Fac¸ade, which was read in a concert version, with music by William Walton, in January 1922. She encouraged many young artists and was greatly interested in Orwell’s work.

  4. Here, a throat infection.

  [401]

  Review of Red Spanish Notebook by Mary Low and Juan Brea; Heroes of the Alcazar by R. Timmermans; Spanish Circus by Martin Armstrong

  Time and Tide, 9 October 1937

  Red Spanish Notebook gives a vivid picture of Loyalist Spain, both at the front and in Barcelona and Madrid, in the earlier and more revolutionary period of the war. It is admittedly a partisan book, but probably it is none the worse for that. The joint authors were working for the P.O.U.M., the most extreme of the revolutionary parties, since suppressed by the Government. The P.O.U.M. has been so much vilified in the foreign, and especially the Communist press, that a statement of its case was badly needed.

  Up till May of this year the situation in Spain was a very curious one. A mob of mutually hostile political parties were fighting for their lives against a common enemy, and at the same time quarrelling bitterly among themselves as to whether this was or was not a revolution as well as a war. Definitely revolutionary events had taken place – land had been seized by the peasants, industries collectivized, big capitalists killed or driven out, the Church practically abolished – but there had been no fundamental change in the structure of government. It was a situation capable of developing either towards Socialism
or back to capitalism; and it is now clear that, given a victory over Franco, some kind of capitalist republic will emerge. But at the same time there was occurring a revolution of ideas that was perhaps more important than the short-lived economic changes. For several months large blocks of people believed that all men are equal and were able to act on their belief. The result was a feeling of liberation and hope that is difficult to conceive in our money-tainted atmosphere. It is here that Red Spanish Notebook is valuable. By a series of intimate day-to-day pictures (generally small things: a bootblack refusing a tip, a notice in the brothels saying, ‘Please treat the women as comrades’) it shows you what human beings are like when they are trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine. No one who was in Spain during the months when people still believed in the revolution will ever forget that strange and moving experience. It has left something behind that no dictatorship, not even Franco’s, will be able to efface.

  In every book written by a political partisan one has got to be on the look-out for one or another class of prejudice. The authors of this book are Trotskyists – I gather that they were sometimes an embarrassment to the P.O.U.M., which was not a Trotskyist body, though for a while it had Trotskyists working for it – and, therefore their prejudice is against the official Communist Party, to which they are not always strictly fair. But is the Communist Party always strictly fair to the Trotskyists? Mr. C. L.R. James,1 author of that very able book World Revolution, contributes an introduction.

  Heroes of the Alcazar re-tells the story of the siege last autumn, when a garrison mainly of cadets and Civil Guards held out for seventy-two days against terrible odds, until Toledo was relieved by Franco’s troops. There is no need because one’s sympathies are on the other side to pretend that this was not a heroic exploit. And some of the details of siege-life are very interesting; I particularly liked the account of the ingenious way in which a motor-bicycle engine was hitched onto a hand-mill to grind corn for the garrison. But the book is poorly written, in a glutinous style, full of piety and denunciations of the ‘Reds’. There is an introduction by Major Yeats Brown, who generously concedes that not all the‘Red Militia’ were ‘cruel and treacherous’. The photographs of groups of defenders bring home one of the most pathetic aspects of the civil war. They are so like groups of Government militiamen that if they were changed round no one would know the difference.