skygiants

After eight years or so, I have now read Orwell in Spain so that I could finally return it to gramarye1971 during my very brief stint in DC last week. I don't regret the long wait -- as always, Orwell is timely and never moreso than when he's talking about situations that are messy, complicated, unwinnable and un-abandonable.

Orwell in Spain includes the full text of Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's book about the Spanish Civil War, as well as various contextualizing letters and articles he wrote while there and on returning.

I first read Homage to Catalonia back in 2011, and, unlike most of the things I wrote in 2011, my review of it from that time still pretty much encapsulates the things I would say about it now. What sticks with me more, this time, is how Orwell talks about the ragtag Marxist-anarchist battalion he accidentally ends up in as the only time in his life that he's ever had the chance to see the ideal of absolute equality, abolition of hierarchy, collective action, in practice, and how it convinced him it could be put into practice, that it was a realizable dream and one worth fighting for -- about how he was miserable and hungry and cold all the time and achieved absolutely nothing and still.

But of course context is important. And though Orwell is very determined to try and be fair-minded, and to encourage his readers to treat him as biased and to come to their own conclusions, the most interesting thing about the contextualization provided in Orwell in Spain is how it shows how much he was driven by his concern for his friends who were in prison, and his goal of raising some kind of outcry among international Socialists for their release. He writes reviews and articles, many of which are not published because they do not accord with the party line of What We Should Feel About Spain; he argues endlessly and demands receipts from everyone who publishes an account of what happened during the street fighting in Barcelona that doesn't accord with his lived experience; he returns consistently and desperately to the topic of his superior officer, who is probably still in jail, Situation Unknown.

And then the superior officer gets out of jail, and the next bit of writing included in the compilation is from several years later. This may be fiat on the part of the editor of Orwell in Spain, but it very much serves to emphasize that the personal is political. It's not that I don't think Orwell cared about the truth generally, because I do think he did, but also it's got to feel much more important to scream when you know it's going to immediately and directly impact the people you care about.

So once upon a time, George Orwell decided that he was going to go to Spain to fight the good fight! Take a stand against Fascism! Support the forces of the humble workers!

Then he got to Spain, ended up mostly by accident enrolled in the Marxist-worker's-party militia rather than the Russian-Communist-backed militia where most of the other British intellectuals were signed up, and realized that things were quite a bit more complicated than that.

- but first there were the months of extreme cold and boredom, on frozen watch in a tiny mountain station, guarding against an equally tiny and enormously faraway station on the opposite side of the mountain. (It's kind of bizarre reading this part, because one moment Orwell will be relating a funny story about how the guy with the bugle would be convincing soldiers on the other side to desert by just reciting loudly a litany of all the really good (imaginary) food they had on their side of the divide, and talking about how ridiculous the whole thing really is and feeling quite sorry for the Fascist soldiers, and then the next moment he'll be complaining how he just wants to at least kill one Fascist in the whole war, seriously, just one, how hard is that? And there's no contradiction in these attitudes for him, apparently. When he kills his first enemy there's no conflicted feelings, it's just like "YES! Got one! FINALLY!")

So Orwell is fighting, and it's really not very glamorous, and in many ways miserable, and most of the command decisions just seem incredibly stupid, but, you know, he is building a kind of cameraderie with his fellow soldiers, he's still fighting the good fight . . . and then he gets back to Barcelona on leave to meet up with his wife and transfer to the other political party brigade. And suddenly it becomes clear that the whole time he's been on the front fighting with the brigade that he just happened to wind up in, there's been vicious political infighting going on back in the city - that the anti-Fascist socialist parties that he couldn't even keep particularly straight at the beginning of the war really don't like each other, and one - the one he doesn't belong to - is getting ready to heavily squash the other. At which point there is a riot, and three days of highly surreal street warfare followed by a heavy propaganda campaign against the Marxist worker's party. Orwell quietly withdraws his request to transfer to the now-ascendant party and goes back to the Marxist worker's brigade he's been fighting with all this time.

And then Orwell goes off to fight again, and comes home wounded and half-deaf to find that of his friends who have been fighting alongside him, several of them have been locked up on suspicion - some never to emerge again - and he walks into a hotel one day and his wife is making frantic "DON'T COME IN HERE" signals over the heads of some soldiers. (Orwell's wife is not mentioned very much, which seems a drastic oversight by Orwell, considering that she was hanging out for months in the middle of revolutionary Spain and every time she does appear she is being coolheaded and brave and competent.) And then they make a daring escape, and wander around shellshocked for a while, and then Orwell sits down to write a book about it, Homage to Catalonia, explaining that - while his experiences are personal, and may not be reflective - the situation in Spain is significantly more complicated than everyone thought.

And then of course nobody buys the book, because by then the propaganda campaign that the winning political party has brought to bear has been hugely successful and nobody wants to hear ill of them. But it's very much worth reading now.

(What gets me is the part where he apologizes for being angry. Because he knows the situation is complicated, he really does, and that it's a waste of time to be angry when you could be doing more productive things, but they took a friend of his who had given up a promising career to come fight on behalf of Spain and the people that he'd been fighting for threw him in jail, never to come out alive, and that sort of thing, says Orwell, does try one's patience.)