Dear Mr Postgate,2
You may perhaps remember meeting me once at a party of Warburg’s. You also wrote to me once about a book of mine, a letter that never got answered because I was in Spain at the time.
The trial of the Executive Committee of the P.O.U.M., which the Spanish Government has been postponing for about sixteen months, has just begun, and from such reports as I can obtain here I see that, as was to be expected, they are being accused of things which everyone with any knowledge of the facts knows to be untrue. I do not think that we can assume as yet that they will not get a fair trial, and obviously we have no right to obstruct or interfere with the Spanish Government even if we were able to do so. But at the same time in the French press (and I have no doubt it will be the same in the English) all kinds of untruthful statements are being made and it is extremely difficult to get an opportunity of answering them. I expect you have some inner knowledge of this affair and are aware that the accusations against the P.O.U.M. in Spain are only a by-product of the Russian Trotskyist trials and that from the start every kind of lie, including flagrant absurdities, has been circulated in the Communist press. It has been almost impossible to answer these because the Communist press, naturally, does not publish letters from opponents and the rest of the left-wing press has been held back by a desire not to embarrass the Spanish Government. At the same time it is difficult to see what good is done by malicious lies directed against innocent people. The accusation (which seems to be fully accepted by the French press of this country – pro-Franco, by the way) which especially troubles me is that the 29th division (the P.O.U.M. troops) deserted from the Aragón front. Everyone with any knowledge of the facts, including those who make the accusation, knows that this is a lie. I myself served with the 29th division from December 30 1936 to May 20 1937, and the I.L.P. could give you the addresses of from ten to twenty other Englishmen, some of whom remained at the front a good deal longer than I did – this in addition to the thousands of Spaniards who could contradict the story. This cowardly libel against brave men can only be circulated because of the perhaps well-meaning refusal of the left-wing press to have this affair properly ventilated.
If this accusation is also flung about in the English press, and any opportunity of contradicting it arises, could you not lend your weight to it? Any statement from such a person as yourself would come much better than from anyone like me, who am obviously a prejudiced witness. The I.L.P. can give you all the details of the affair. You would be perfectly safe in saying that you know on good authority that all the stories of desertion, collaboration with the enemy etc. are untrue.
I enclose a summary of an article from La Flèche giving the views of various members of the Spanish Government on the case. So far as I know it contains no inaccuracies. In any case Maxton and others can verify. Even if you cannot see your way to doing anything about this, please forgive me for writing.
Yours sincerely
[not signed]
1. From 2 September 1938 to 26 March 1939, the Orwells were in French Morocco, mainly at Marrakesh. Orwell had been advised (incorrectly) that the climate would be good for his chest complaint. He was able to go because of an anonymous gift-which Orwell accepted as a loan and which he repaid from the proceeds of Animal Farm – from the novelist L. H. Myers. He never learned Myers was his benefactor. While in Marrakesh he wrote Coming Up for Air. See Crick, 369-74; Shelden, 328-34; and P. Davison, George Orwell: A Literary Life, in —13.
2. Raymond Postgate (1896-1971) edited Tribune, 1940-42 (to which Orwell contributed). Among his best-known books was The Common People, 1746–1938 (1938), written in collaboration with G. D. H. Cole. He also wrote on food and wine. Cole (1889-1959) was an economist and novelist, whose writing on economics was often effectively directed to the general reader – for example, The Intelligent Man’s Guide Through World Chaos (1932) and What Everybody Wants to Know About Money (1933).
Orwell made two copies of this summary of the article in La Flèche of 14
October 1938, by L.-P. Foucaud.
The act of accusation against the P.O.U.M. repeats the charge of espionage formulated by the Communist press. On this subject two international delegations have obtained statements from the principal members of the Spanish Government.
To the first delegation, composed of Fenner Brockway, general secretary of the I.L.P., Charles Wolff and R. Louzon, editor of La Révolution Prolétarienne:
M. Irujo, Minister of Justice, declared: ‘That the accusations of espionage brought against the P.O.U.M. were not founded on any fact that could be taken seriously’ (aucun fait serieux).
M. Miravitlles, general secretary of the Department of Propaganda of the Catalan Generalidad, declared: ‘That the “Golfin” document* was for him and for President Companys a forgery so obvious that at the moment when it was presented to him, he burst into such a shout of laughter that no one dared make use of it any longer.’
M. Largo Caballero stated: ‘That if at present the P.O.U.M. was being prosecuted for espionage, this was solely for political reasons and because the Communist Party wished the P.O.U.M. to be suppressed.’
To a second delegation, composed of Mr. Maxton, M.P, M. Weill-Curiel, M. Yves Levy and M. L.-P. Foucaud, various Spanish ministers made similar declarations.
M. Irujo, at 12 o’clock on the 20 August 1937 at the Ministry of Justice in Valencia, stated: ‘That there was no proof of espionage against the P.O.U.M. and that the “Golfin” document was valueless.’
M. Ortega y Gasset expressed his disbelief in the P.O.U.M. leaders being Fascist spies. M. Prieto, then Minister of War, received the delegation on August 23 1937. Not having seen the dossier, he refused to speak of the accusation of espionage, but added that: ‘The arrest of the P.O.U.M. leaders had not been decided by the Government, but by the police, which the Communists had infiltrated (noyautée) according to their usual custom.’
All these statements, in particular Prieto’s, can be obtained in the report on the Maxton delegation published by Independent News. In addition there is the pamphlet Terror in Spain by Mr John McGovern M.P, dealing with a later delegation and confirming the above.
The fate of this draft is given in Orwell’s own handwritten note at the head of the letter:
Draft of letter sent to Raymond Postgate at the time of POUM trial. Similar letters sent to J. F. Horrabin & C. E. M. Joad.3 All, of course, unable to do anything, but all answered sympathetically & appeared to accept my version. R. P. offered to give part of ‘Fact’4 to publicity about the 29th division if J. McNair supplied the facts.
On 14 November 1938, a letter by the General Secretary of the ILP, Fenner Brockway, was published in the Manchester Guardian. This summarized a full report of the trial. He stated that the charge of espionage made against the prisoners ‘completely collapsed during the trial’ and was dropped by the prosecution. The charge that the POUM divisions ‘had deserted the front was also dropped’. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the final indictment (that members of the POUM ‘hadjoined the uprising provoked by rebellious elements in Barcelona in May, 1937), that was the only charge upon which anyone was found guilty. Four prisoners were sentenced to fifteen years’ internment and one to eleven years’. Thus, he concluded, ‘the accusations against the P.O. U.M. of Fascist espionage and desertion at the front, which have been spread throughout the world by the Communist International and some of its innocent allies, have been shown to have no basis in fact’ Full accounts of those accused, the trial, the dropping of the principal charges and the sentences for involvement in the May Events of Barcelona are given in various issues of the New Leader; see, for instance, 21 October, 4 and 11 November 1938. The accused sentenced to eleven years’ imprisonment was Jordi Arquer, to whom Orwell had Leonard Moore send a copy of the Italian translation of Homage to Catalonia (published in Italy in December 1948); (see 3651).
* Generally referred to in the English press as ‘the N document’ [Orwell’s note].
3. J.
F. Horrabin was a journalist, illustrator, Labour MP, 1929-31, and a member of the editorial board of Controversy. (See p. 241, n. 1, above) C. E. M. Joad (1891-1953) was a philosopher and writer. He achieved particular fame as a member of the team of the BBC’s radio programme The Brains Trust. From 1930 until his death, he was head of the Department of Psychology and Philosophy, Birkbeck College, University of London.
4. Fact, subtitled A Monograph a Month, was published, in twenty-seven issues, from April 1937 to June 1939.
[503]
Review of The Church in Spain, 1737-1937 by E. Allison Peers; Crusade in Spain by Eoin O’Dujfy1
New English Weekly, 24 November 1938
Professor Allison Peers, though a Franco partisan and of late rather an acrimonious one, is a writer who can be taken seriously. He is also, I gather, a Catholic, and he is quite naturally and rightly concerned about the fate of the Church in Spain. No one would blame him for being angry when churches are burned and priests murdered or driven into exile. But I think it is a pity that he has not looked a little more deeply into the reasons why these things happen.
In recounting the various persecutions of the Church in Spain, from the Middle Ages onward, he traces four main causes. The first three are the struggle between Church and King, the struggle between Church and State, and the liberal anticlericalism of the nineteenth century. The last is the ‘development of what is broadly termed Communism, i.e., a number of related but not identical proletarian movements, one common factor of which is disbelief in, and denial of, God’. All church-burning, priest-shooting and anticlerical violence generally are supposed to have their roots in Communism and its Spanish variant, Anarchism, which are inseparable from ‘hatred of God’. It is not, Professor Peers thinks, a question of hostility to a corrupt church, but of ‘a cold, calculated, determined attempt to destroy institutional religion throughout the country’.
Now, it is no use denying that churches have been destroyed all over Government Spain. Various Government partisans, in their efforts to make their cause respectable, have pretended that churches were only demolished when they had been used as fortresses in the street fighting at the beginning of the war. This is merely a lie. Churches were destroyed everywhere, in town and village, and except for a few Protestant churches none were allowed to open and hold services till about August, 1937. It is also useless to deny that both Anarchism and Marxian Socialism are hostile to all religion. But this does not really tell us why the Spanish churches were destroyed. Professor Peers’s Catalonia Infelix2 made it clear that he understands the internal political situation in Government Spain a great deal better than most writers on the Spanish War, and there are two facts bearing on this question which he is probably aware of. One is the fact that during the present war the Russian Government has used its influence in Spain against and not for anticlerical violence and revolutionary extremism generally. The other is that the sacking of churches happened during the early period when the proletariat were in control, and the churches began to re-open and the priests to come out of hiding, when the Caballero Government fell and the middle class was back in the saddle. In other words the anticlerical movement, in its violent form, is a popular movement and a native Spanish movement. It has its roots not in Marx or Bakunin,3 but in the condition of the Spanish people themselves.
In Catalonia and Aragón, in the first year of war, there were two things that impressed me. One was the apparent absence of any religious feeling whatever among the mass of the people. Admittedly at the time it might have been dangerous to admit openly to religious belief – still, one cannot be altogether deceived about a thing like that. The second was the fact that most of the wrecked or damaged churches that I saw were new ones; their predecessors had been burnt down in earlier disturbances. And this raises the thought, when was the last church burnt down in England? Probably not since Cromwell. A mob of English farm hands sacking the parish church would be something next door to unthinkable. Why? Because at present the conditions of class warfare simply do not exist in England. In Spain, for a century past, millions of people had had to live in conditions that were beyond bearing. Over huge tracts of country peasants who were serfs in everything but name worked enormous hours for wages of sixpence a day. In these conditions you get something that we have not got in England, a real hatred of the status quo, a real willingness to kill and burn. But the Church was part of the status quo; its influence was on the side of the wealthy. In many villages the huge garish church, with the cluster of miserable mud huts surrounding it, must have seemed the visible symbol of property. Naturally, Catholic writers have of late been denying this. The Church was not corrupt, it was anything but wealthy, the priests were often good Republicans, etc., etc. The answer is that the Spanish common people, whose opinion on this matter is worth something, did not think so. In the eyes of at any rate very many of them, the Church was simply a racket and the priest, the boss and the landlord were all of a piece. The national church had lost its hold on them because it had failed in its job. Catholics would probably do their Church a better service by facing this fact than by tracing everything to mere wickedness, or to Moscow, which persecutes its own religious believers but has its reasons for being slightly pro-clerical elsewhere.
General O’Duffy’s adventures in Spain do seem in one way to have resembled a crusade, in that they were a frightful muddle and led to nothing in particular. Otherwise his book does not tell one much. For the most part it consists of the usual vapid tributes to General Franco (‘the great leader and patriot, General Franco, at the head of the Nationalist Movement, composed of all that is great and noble in Spanish national life, fighting for Christian civilization’, etc., etc.) and the usual ignorant misrepresentations of what is happening on the other side. General O’Duffy’s information is so sketchy that he even gets the names of some of the Spanish trade unions and political parties wrong. Franco propaganda is often less irritating than the rather subtler type of lie that has been evolved by the other side, but I confess to getting tired of that story of the ‘Russian troops’ (it is not recorded whether they had snow on their boots4) who are supposed to have fought on the Madrid front.
After what I saw in Spain, and what I have read about it in England, I understand why Sir Walter Raleigh burned his History of the World.5 If
The truth is great and will prevail
When none cares whether it prevail or not,6
then the sooner people stop feeling strongly about this Spanish struggle, the better it will be. At present the atmosphere of lies that surrounds every aspect of it is suffocating. Meanwhile O’Duffy s is a badly written and uninteresting book.
Orwell’s review drew protests from both authors. On 4 December General O’Duffy wrote to the editor of New English Weekly, asking that his letter not be published, but describing Orwell’s review as scurrilous. The word ‘review’ is underlined and placed in single quotation marks, evidently to indicate an anomalous, to him, use of the word. His book had, he said, received twenty four favourable reviews and only one other (in a ‘Communist organ) that was critical. He enclosed copies of typical reviews and claimed that his book had ‘a record circulation here & abroad’, strange if as Orwell claimed, the book was ‘an ignorant representation and badly written. The letter is marked ‘Came while you were in Africa and was evidently not sent to Orwell at the time, but it was answered. O’Duffy replied to the effect that the editor’s letter merely added insult to injury, and he asked that his name be removed from New English Weekly’s circulation list.
Professor Peers’s letter was published on 8 December 1938. He made thee points: he was not a Roman Catholic; he was not a ‘Franco partisan, but had maintained that the Spanish conflict could be resolved permanently only by agreement; his conclusions as to ‘why these things happen were not the product of a visit of a few months but of twenty years’ study of many aspects of Spanish life. Orwell’s response, headed ‘Spanish Clericalism, was published in the New English Weekly on 22 D
ecember 1938:
Sir, – I am very sorry to see that I have hurt Professor Peers’ feelings. I did not mean to do so. But perhaps I had better answer the three points he raises:
1. I only said that I ‘gathered’ that Professor Peers was a Catholic. My reason was simply that he is much more friendly in his attitude to the Catholic Church than is usual in non-Catholics, even including Anglicans. But I freely admit that his not being a Catholic makes his testimony in favour of the Spanish Church stronger.
2. I described Professor Peers as ‘a Franco partisan and of late rather an acrimonious one’. I do not think Professor Peers would deny that the tone of The Church in Spain is a good deal more bitter than that of Catalonia Infelix. As to the question of partisanship, Professor Peers claims to be impartial on the ground that he has ‘continually maintained… that the only solution to the Spanish conflict that can be permanent is a solution by agreement’. Well, I should regard that as being pro-Franco. After all, Franco is, at least technically, a rebel. What should we say of a person who suggested a ‘solution by agreement’ between the burglar and the policeman? We should say that he was at any rate to some extent pro-burglar. But I never for an instant meant to suggest that Professor Peers was unfair or dishonest. When I read Catalonia Infelix, I regarded it as a book written from the Franco standpoint but written with extreme fair-mindedness. I believe I said something to this effect in a short review that I did of it. Incidentally, it may amuse Professor Peers to learn that I have been in trouble in ‘left’ circles for not attacking him more severely. 3. I quite agree that Professor Peers knows infinitely more about the Church in Spain, and everything else in Spain, than I am ever likely to know. But I think that his explanation of modern anti-clericalism is altogether too simple to be true, and I do not see why my own observations, small as they are, should not be advanced as evidence.
Orwell in Spain Page 42
