Dos Passos,Īlready far on the path of disenchantment, was deeply troubled by what he saw and heard, but he was cautious in voicing his doubts. Koestler's disillusionment began there, and he let it find expression in his first novel, "The Gladiators," but he did not talk then about what he had seen in Spain. Orwell was not the only man toīe disillusioned with communism in Spain. For that matter, it is remarkable that he wrote the book at all. That he could have written so objective a book so soon after his almost fatal involvement in the war itself and in the partisan conflict seems miraculous. He managed to avoid the police for a few days, and then he and his wife, with a good deal of luck, escaped into France. had been suppressed and many of its members jailed. As he was going through the process of getting a medical discharge he was suddenly warned by friends that the P.O.U.M. When he came out of the hospital his right hand was paralyzed and he had lost his voice - permanently, the doctor said, though Orwell went back to the front and ten days later got a bullet through his neck that just missed the carotid artery. Then troops came from Valencia, and the street fighting stopped. Love for the idealized 'worker' as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but 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 IĪm on." What he did was to spend three nights on the roof of a moving-picture house, watching over P.O.U.M. The issue seemed perfectly clear to Orwell: "I have no particular On May 3 a struggle began between the syndicalist unions and the Catalonian police force. Thus he happened to be in Barcelona at the time of what became known as the P.O.U.M. He returned to the front, so plenty ofĪction for a time and then, toward the end of April, went on to leave to Barcelona, where his wife was waiting for him. After some weeks of great hardship and little action of the Zaragoza front he was hospitalized for ten days with a poisoned hand. Marxista, a rather small group of anti-Stalinist revolutionaries. The militia Orwell joined, more or less by accident, had been organized by P.O.U.M., the Partido Obrero de Unificacion There were several political parties on the Loyalist side in Spain, and to begin with each of them had its own militia. "There was much in it that I did not understand," he wrote "in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting In Barcelona, he felt, all men were equal, and there was hope in the air. It did: he promptly enlisted, "because at that time and in that place it seemed the only conceivable thing to do." The time that he would get into the war if it seemed to be his kind of fight. He went to Spain, he said, to write some newspaper articles, but he probably knew all He was not a Communist, as were Malraux and Koestler, but he was a revolutionary Socialist, affiliated with the Independent Labor party. Some went to fight and some to write, but they were all partisans, all certain that the issue was clear cut - the people vs. Writers were streaming into Loyalist Spain from all over Europe and America - Malraux and Koestler and Hemingway and Dos Passos and countless others - and many of those who didn't That Orwell should have gone to Spain was in no wise remarkable. Now, two years after theĪuthor's death, it has been published over here, and it is alive, whereas most of the books about Spain that were published in this country in the late Thirties and were read are dead. Ļecause of what Orwell was, "Homage to Catalonia," his account of his experiences in the Spanish civil war, is worth reading today, fifteen years after it was written. "In theory," he wrote, "I rather admire the Spaniards for not sharing our time neurosis but unfortunately I share Luxury that I had money to buy." He loved the Spanish people and was constantly exasperated with them. When, for example, he returned from the front to Barcelona in the spring of 1937, he deplored the growing extravagance, adding: "But God forbid that I should pretend to any personal superiority. He had a sharp eye for human weaknesses, his own as well as other people's. He George Orwell who went to Spain in late 1936 was a man who could analyze his feelings when he shot for the first time a human being and yet take careful aim, whoĬould calmly examine the risks he was running without pretending not to be afraid, who could set down his exact emotions on receiving what seemed to be a mortal wound. George Orwell's Prelude in Spain By GRANVILLE HICKS
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |