Orwell
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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.”29 “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).31 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.”33
Orwell confirms these exalted feelings when he writes soon after his return from England, “No one who was in Spain during the months when people still believed in the revolution will ever forget that strange and moving experience.” Four years later he states that the Spanish “civil war made a deep and painful impression on the English intelligentsia, deeper, I should say, than has yet been made by the war now raging.”34 In his review of Borkenau's The Spanish Cockpit, he echoes Kipling's “Tommy” and refers to the International Brigade as “a thin line of suffering and often ill-armed human beings standing between barbarism and at least comparative decency.”
Orwell was always volunteering for the most difficult and dangerous missions; and when he found things too quiet in Aragon, he tried to join the International Brigade and get sent into combat at the Madrid front. He came to Spain as a journalist but “joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do” (4). He volunteers for the parapet attack and to recover the wounded afterward and to smuggle rifles back to the POUM building. He offers himself in Sietamo when it appears that fighting will start again, although he has a hole in his neck and a medical discharge and is too weak to jump
down from the lorry. Far more than most men, Orwell lived his words: “To understand a political movement one has got to be involved in it.” The greatness of Homage to Catalonia is that Orwell's honesty, idealism and courage are embodied in his own mind and spirit and action.
SEVEN
REPEATING THE OLD LIES
I've interviewed people who were angry, hostile and insulting; who'd fallen into a toilet and had to be extracted; who made me as drunk as they were; who were confined to insane asylums and on their deathbeds. I discovered illegitimate children, introduced unknown siblings to each other and even held Wyndham Lewis’ mighty brain in my hand. The interviews described in this essay presented a new problem: ideological blindness. And I had the usual practical difficulty, in a limited amount of time and with a deaf informant, of trying to eat and drink, ask questions and take notes, look at letters and copy down as much as I could.
As a biographer, I'm often more puzzled than enlightened by personal interviews. Establishing the facts is tricky enough, and the truth can be elusive. The people I talk to may be old, have frail health or failing memories. They sometimes “remember” what's been written or said instead of what actually happened, or say what they think I want to hear. They may even lie to make themselves look better. Recently, I came across a new difficulty in literary biography: ideological blindness.
I went to England in November 1998 to do research for a life of George Orwell. I had the names of two men, Frank Frankford and Sam Lesser, who'd fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. Frankford, who'd been in the Anarchist POUM (United Marxist Workers Party) militia with Orwell, and was now aged eighty-five, had agreed to see me; but I didn't know anything about Lesser, or if he was still alive. After talking to them I realized that the two men, fighting on different fronts, Barcelona and Madrid, had in fact been intimately connected. Lesser had changed the life of Frankford, and Frankford had been searching for him for the last sixty years.
I knew that Frankford had played a notorious role in Orwell's life. In 1937 Frankford was arrested in Barcelona for trying to sell paintings stolen from museums or looted from churches. After his release from jail with the help of an English intermediary, the British Daily Worker of September 14, 1937, published a story about him. In the article Frankford accused POUM, and especially its commander, Georges Kopp, of secretly helping the Fascists on the Aragon front in northeast Spain and of deliberately rebelling against their Communist allies in Barcelona.
To validate the story the Daily Worker claimed that it had first appeared in the Spanish press, and then quoted Frankford's detailed accusations: “Every night at 11 p.m. the sentries heard the rattle of a cart, and we could tell from its light that it was crossing the space between the positions on our left and the Fascist lines. We were ordered never to shoot at this light…. Near Huesca … one night we saw Commandant Kopp returning from the Fascist lines.” Two days later, to lend authenticity to the story, the Daily Worker printed Frankford's corrections. He now said he wasn't so sure: “he was not certain that the carts actually crossed the line, nor had he himself actually seen Kopp returning from the Fascist lines.”
Frankford's false statement that POUM had collaborated with the Fascist forces in Aragon was repeated in a vicious book by Georges Soria, Trotskyism in the Service of Franco: Facts and Documents on the Activities of the P.O.U.M., which was brought out in London in 1938 by the Communist publishers Lawrence and Wishart. This book was used to justify the Communist extermination of their former POUM allies in Barcelona. Frankford's condemnation did great harm to former comrades, like Kopp, who were arrested, imprisoned and tortured, and like Orwell, who were hunted down and threatened with execution. In Homage to Catalonia (1938) Orwell described these events from personal experience, and made Kopp the hero of his book.
Frankford's accusations were forcefully refuted by Orwell's article in the British New Leader of September 24, 1937, which was signed by fourteen members of the British contingent. He concluded: “it is quite obvious that all these wild statements … were put into Frankford's mouth by the Barcelona journalists, and that he chose to save his skin by assenting to them, because at that time it was extremely dangerous to be known to have any connection with the P.O.U.M.” The Left-wing politician Fenner Brockway later verified this statement. In his autobiography, Inside the Left (1942), Brockway wrote that when “the boy” (Frankford was actually twenty-four) returned to London he came to the office of the Independent Labour Party, which was affiliated with POUM, and spoke to John McNair, who had escaped from Barcelona with Orwell: “He broke down crying and begged forgiveness. He had been imprisoned in Barcelona, and had been presented with the document to sign as a condition of freedom.”
But forty-two years later, in December 1979, Frankford repeated his accusations to Orwell's biographer. Bernard Crick wrote:
Frankford denies that he ever broke down or asked forgiveness; says that he never signed anything, but simply gave an interview to Sam Lessor [sic] of The Daily Worker which he embellished, and he sticks to his story that there was fraternisation and crossing of the lines on occasion (which seems plausible), but he is “not sure” whether he ever thought that guns rather than fruit and vegetables ever figured in such movements, though “there are things still to be explained.” (When I asked him if he was not angry at The Daily Worker for putting words into his mouth, Mr. Frankford replied: “Quite legitimate in politics, I am a realist.”)
Four years later, when closely questioned in an Arena television program of December 1983, Frankford squirmed uneasily and forced out a fake smile. He now denied that he'd ever made the accusations and insisted: “I don't remember that…. I don't think I ever said that … that wasn't true and I wouldn't have said that.” When asked about the propriety of publishing such stories, he replied with surprising cynicism: “Certain tactics are legitimate when you are fighting a battle like this.” Not at all horrified that such statements could be attributed to him, he said, “it rather amuses me.”
On a long shot, before seeing Frankford, I called Lesser's old phone number. Now eighty-three, he answered in a gruff, aggressive voice. When I mentioned my book on Orwell, he became extremely hostile and asked: “What the hell are you ringing me for?” I said I understood that he'd been in the Spanish War. He exclaimed that he was a Communist who'd fought and was wounded with the International Brigade, and was violently antagonistic to both Orwell and POUM.
As I questioned him about his background, he first vented his anger, then calmed down and became more friendly. He'd spent his whole professional life as a journalist on the Daily Worker. Since his brother was also on the paper, he'd reversed the letters of his last name and used the byline “Sam Russell.” When I said his brother must have been the greater Lesser and he the lesser Lesser, he laughed and we broke the ice.
Still repeating the old lies—which he may have believed after a lifetime of professional lying—Lesser claimed that POUM had started the revolution in Barcelona behind the front and stabbed the Communists in the back.
He also maintained that members of POUM had driven around Barcelona in the ambulances so desperately needed at the front. POUM, he said, had plenty of medical supplies when the International Brigades had nothing at all. When he was wounded he had to be evacuated by ox-cart. I listened patiently to these angry assertions, hearing the bitterness of past years, and didn't try to refute them.
Despite all his contradictory interviews, ranging over sixty years, Frankford was still eager to talk again when I turned up in 1998. I realized I was dealing with a deaf and probably muddled old man. I had made the appointment over the phone with his wife, but he then called back to get my address so he could send me directions to his house in Wells, Somerset. The directions never reached me (the house was hard to find) because he really couldn't hear me on the phone. I arrived late and hungry at noon. Mrs. Frankford gave me a sandwich, and poured me a glass of Spanish wine. So I struggled to eat, drink, ask questions, take notes, look a
t the documents he offered me and copy whatever I could—all at the same time.
Though apparently robust, the stocky, white-haired Frankford had trouble hearing my questions and his memories were clearly embellished. After discussing his background and explaining why he went to Spain, he claimed (like most other British volunteers on the Aragon front) that he was the one standing next to Orwell when he was shot through the throat and caught him when he fell. Frankford maintained that just before he was shot Orwell “was telling us of his experiences working in a Paris brothel”—unlikely, since he had worked in a restaurant.
Frankford readily admitted that he disliked Orwell because of “his attack on the English working class” in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which he had read in Spain. Orwell had been a policeman in Burma and assumed leadership of the British contingent. Frankford resented this, as well as Orwell's belief that “everything he did was right.” He was also annoyed that Stafford Cottman (another British member of POUM), rather than himself, had been invited to Spain for the Arena television program. He didn't seem to realize that his role in events in Barcelona precluded such an invitation.
Frankford then described his arrest, along with his mate “Tankie,” who'd served in the Tank Corps in World War I. The Spanish police saw Frankford reading an English book, suspected him of being a spy and stopped him for questioning. They found the looted items, arrested him and put him in prison. An Englishman, Sam Lesser, got him out of jail and advised him to leave Spain as soon as possible. But he didn't know if Lesser had published the Daily Worker story and didn't know where Lesser was—though he'd been trying to find him for a long time. When I said I had just spoken to Lesser and had his address and phone number, Frankford was astonished.