Orwell (14 page)

According to Orwell, “The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being antitotalitarian.” Except for Orwell, Trotsky, Borkenau, and a few others, no one seemed to realize “that among the parties on the Government side the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left, but upon the extreme Right” (56). Since the Loyalist revolutionaries had no footing in the foreign press, Orwell had to tell the truth. But he was a voice crying in the wilderness: his book sold only six hundred copies in its first twelve years and was not even published in America until after his death.

For Orwell, this Loyalist internecine strife was more horrible than actual warfare against the Fascists. During the street fighting, “I was in no danger, I suffered from nothing worse than hunger and boredom, yet it was one of the most unbearable periods in my whole life. I think few experiences could be more sickening, more disillusioning or, finally, more nerve-racking” (130). Yet Orwell's “thrill of hope” was never extinguished and he remained “an affirming flame”: “When you have had a glimpse of such a disaster as this—and however it ends the Spanish war will turn out to have been an appalling disaster, quite apart from the slaughter and the physical suffering—the result is not necessarily disillusionment and cynicism. Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings” (230).

His conception of human decency is manifested in comradeship and solidarity, and is symbolized by the moving handshakes of the Italian militiaman and Spanish police officer at the beginning and end of the book. This idea of comradeship is at the very core of
Homage
and is elaborated in numerous ways—humanistic, psychological, idealistic and heroic. Orwell shares the concept of “the virile fraternity” with the great masculine writers like Melville, Conrad, and Malraux, who writes of Vincent Berger in
The Walnut Trees of Altenburg:
“What he liked about war was the masculine comradeship, the irrevocable commitments that courage imposes.”
²⁰
This sense of a brotherhood that shares the intimacy of death is general rather than local and extends to all combatants. When enemy deserters slip across the Loyalist lines and Orwell sees his first “real Fascists,” “it struck me that they were indistinguishable from ourselves, except that they wore khaki overalls” (17). And when he lies next to a wounded Assault Guard in Monzon Hospital, he says, “‘In Barcelona we should have been shooting one another,' and we laughed over this” (202). Similarly, during the soldiers' talk across the rooftop barricades near the Café Moka (which recalls the famous scene in
The Red Badge of Courage
where foes converse along a narrow river bank), the peaceful Orwell yells:

Hi! Don't you shoot at us!

What?

Don't you fire at us or we'll fire back!

No, No! I wasn't firing at you…. We don't want to shoot you.

We are only workers, the same as you are. (133)

This powerful bond makes Orwell a reluctant warrior. Once, in the trenches, Orwell suddenly came very close to an enemy and “could see him clearly. He was bareheaded and seemed to have nothing on except a blanket which he was clutching round his shoulders. If I had fired I could have blown him to pieces … [but] I never even thought of firing.” Instead, Orwell chases and prods him with a bayonet but never quite catches him—“a comic memory for me to look back upon, though I suppose it seemed less comic to him” (92). The point here is that Orwell does not really want to kill the man, and this is reinforced by the well-known incident described in “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War” (1943). Again, a vulnerable enemy suddenly appears: “He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him…. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists'; but a man holding up his trousers isn't a ‘Fascist,' he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don't feel like shooting at him.”
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This sense of comradeship and solidarity that Orwell experienced in Spain answered his deep-rooted psychological need. In school, Burma, Paris-London and Wigan, Orwell had been a lonely outsider, and this feeling of intense isolation is reflected in his fictional heroes—Flory, Dorothy and Comstock. He and his wife went to Spain right after their marriage, and it was the first time in his life that he was not isolated and alien. United in a common cause with the Spanish Loyalists, he became passionately attached to them.

In the autobiographical ninth chapter of
The Road to Wigan Pier
, a book Orwell completed just before leaving for Spain, he relates how the overpowering guilt that resulted from his years as a colonial oppressor in Burma forced him to seek expiation among the down-and-outs of Paris and London: “I could go among these people, see what their lives were like and feel myself temporarily part of their world. Once I had been among them and accepted by them … part of my guilt would drop from me.”
²²
Though Orwell knows he can belong to this world only “temporarily,” he is desperate to be “accepted,” for only then can he begin to shed his guilt. Despite his extensive experience with low life and poverty in Burma, “I was still
half-afraid of the working-class. I wanted to get in touch with them, I even wanted to become one of them, but I still thought of them as alien and dangerous…. The people would spot that I was not one of themselves.”
²³

When he finally overcomes his fears and enters a common lodging-house, “it seemed to me like going down into some dreadful subterranean place—a sewer full of rats, for instance.” (The real rats in
Homage
, where he is accepted, are less frightening though they become the symbol of ultimate horror to the isolated Winston in
Nineteen Eighty-Four.)
²⁴
Orwell is initiated by a drunken stevedore who cries, “'ave a cup of tea, chum!” and he writes that “It was a kind of baptism … everybody was polite and gentle and took me utterly for granted…. [I was] on terms of utter equality with workingclass people.”
²⁵
If tramp life is Orwell's “baptism,” life in the Spanish militia is his “confirmation”—in true equality and comradeship with the working class for the first time in his life. In Aragon they were “all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality…. One had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word ‘comrade' stood for comradeship…. One had breathed the air of equality…. This period … is now of great importance to me. It is so different from the rest of my life” (104–105).

The stevedore's crucial acceptance of Orwell is repeated in another moving, almost ceremonial incident, concerning the dark, ragged boy in his section who was accused of stealing, stripped naked and exonerated. Orwell believed him guilty and was ashamed of his humiliation. Shortly afterwards, when Corporal Orwell got into a dispute with his men about the need for discipline, this boy “sprang into the ring and began passionately defending me. With his strange, wild, Indian gesture he kept exclaiming, ‘He's the best corporal we've got.' … Why is this incident touching to me? Because in any normal circumstances it would have been impossible for good feelings ever to be re-established between this boy and myself.”

Besides Orwell's constant affirmation of the value of the individual in the midst of degradation, there are other striking parallels between the down-andout period and Spain.
Homage
, as Orwell says, is a focal point in his career: it both epitomizes his earlier experiences among the poor and oppressed and anticipates his late political satires. When he first became attracted to the poor he had “no interest in Socialism or any other economic theory”;
²⁶
and when he first came to Catalonia, he “ignored the political side of the war” (46). He states in
Wigan Pier
that he wanted “to get right down among the oppressed, to be one of them and on their side against the tyrants”;
²⁷
and, he repeats in
Homage
, “when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict
with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on” (124). Because the Trotskyist POUM party was the defeated faction of the defeated side, it was deeply attractive to Orwell and answered his compulsive need to seek failure (related to his guilt) and to become a victim. He loved the hopeless individuality of the undisciplined and ill-armed militia, partly because it made military life more difficult and dangerous.

Orwell's response to the tramps and the militia is a similar mixture of boredom and adventure: “And down there in the squalid, and, as a matter of fact, horribly boring sub-world of the tramp I had a feeling of release, of adventure”;
²⁸
“it was simply the mingled boredom and discomfort of stationary warfare … [but] it was rather fun wandering about the dark valleys with stray bullets flying high overhead” (23–25). His encounter with the Italian militiaman, who symbolizes the best qualities of the European working class, allowed him to transcend class differences and form solidarity and comradeship in the same way he had with the Wigan miners: “I liked them and hoped they liked me; but I went among them as a foreigner, and both of us were aware of it.”
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“It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy. I hope he liked me as well as I liked him” (4).

Orwell confesses he hardly knows why he took such an “immediate liking” to the militiaman, and his powerful attraction to the commonplace youth remains vague. More symbolic than real, he exists as a prototype of the soldier-hero and embodiment of the “special atmosphere” of the time (the “palms are only able / To meet within the sound of guns”). Orwell idealizes this man in the same way he did the Burmese, tramps and miners; and Boxer, in
Animal Farm
, is an equine version of the illiterate Italian.

The “special atmosphere” that Orwell describes is one where the primary emotions are released, a time of generous feelings and humane gestures. It is also a time that reveals the very roots of human solidarity, for “war brings it home to the individual that he is
not
altogether an individual.” This comradeship, so vital and so necessary to Orwell, begins even before he reaches Spain, for the night he leaves Paris the slow train “was packed with Czechs, Germans, Frenchmen, all bound on the same mission.” The male pyramid that the sleeping volunteers form on the floor of the train foreshadows Orwell's vivid memory of “young Ramon … snoring with his nose flattened between my shoulder-blades” (105). When they wake in the morning, the French peasants in the fields “stood solemnly upright and gave the anti-Fascist salute.” The political implication of these symbolic incidents is clear: though the international working class achieves solidarity in time of war, it is destined to defeat. This, for Orwell, is perhaps the great tragedy of the interwar period, from
the assassination of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht to the paralysis of the Labour Party when confronted with Spain and with Munich.
³⁰

But the militiaman is also a sacrificial victim, martyred by lies and treacherous guns and forgotten “before your bones were dry.” In this respect his fate is like the meaningless death in a Spanish jail of Bob Smillie, the son of the labor leader who had been on the French train with Orwell and fought with courage and willingness, and of the cruel and absurd imprisonment of Orwell's hero in the book, his
comandante
, Georges Kopp.

This brave Belgian, who is first seen riding a black horse at the head of a column, represents the ideal military leader and reappears at the moments of intense crisis and action—at the parapet assault, the Café Moka attack and the POUM purge in Barcelona. He calls the stagnant trench warfare “a comic opera with an occasional death” (32); and during the chaotic street fighting, he walks “unarmed, up to men who were frightened out of their wits and had loaded guns in their hands” in order to prevent bloodshed (129). After Kopp's arrest, Orwell gives a proud resumé of his life and character: “He was a man who had sacrificed everything—family, nationality, livelihood—simply to come to Spain and fight against Fascism…. He had piled up years of imprisonment for himself if he should ever return to his own country. He had been in the line since October 1936, had worked his way up from militiaman to major, had been in action I do not know how many times, and had been wounded once” (209).

Orwell's courageous attempt to rescue Kopp is a failure, and he flees Spain believing his friend will be shot. Though all books on Orwell repeat this assumption, the recent publication of his letters reveals that in December 1938 Kopp escaped to England “after 18 months in a GPU jail, in which he lost seven stone in weight” (98 pounds).
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Thereafter Kopp continued his amazing career. Orwell's editors write: “He joined the French Foreign Legion in September 1939 and was captured by the Germans … in June 1940. He escaped from a French military hospital and worked … for British Naval Intelligence until betrayed to the Gestapo.” Kopp was rescued by the British in 1943 and died from war wounds in 1951.

Orwell's own “anti-heroic” character is the opposite of Kopp's, who represents an ideal standard against which Orwell measures his own inadequate self. Two of Orwell's contrasting but related roles are presented in the book: comrade and victim. His belief in comradeship allows him to be exploited, and this victimization reaffirms, ironically, his idealistic belief in the “virile fraternity.”

Spain itself, as a conception and a reality, inspired idealism.
³²
Orwell had a deep desire to belong to the oppressed and to experience degradation. He
liked this, not in the Baudelairean sense of self-mortification, but so he could experience the effort and spiritual triumph of preserving decency. According to Stephen Spender, who observed the war as a non-combatant, “within a few weeks Spain had become the symbol of hope for all anti-Fascists. It offered the twentieth century an 1848: that is to say, time and place where a cause representing a greater degree of freedom and justice than a reactionary opposing one, gained victories. It became possible to see the Fascist–anti-Fascist struggle as a real conflict of ideas, not just as the seizure of power by dictators from weak opponents. From being a pathetic catastrophe, Spain lifted the fate of the anti-Fascists to heights of tragedy.”
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