Just as important are the things he wasn’t. He was not yet a major figure, a committed socialist, an expert on totalitarianism, nor a writer whose prose was a windowpane. He was barely George Orwell. Spain was to become the great rupture in his life: his zero hour. Years later, he would tell his friend Arthur Koestler, “History stopped in 1936.” Meaning totalitarianism. Meaning Spain. History stopped, and Nineteen Eighty-Four began.
“Until I was about thirty,” Orwell wrote in middle age, “I always planned my life on the assumption not only that any major undertaking was bound to fail, but that I could only expect to live a few years longer.”
He was born Eric Arthur Blair in India on June 25, 1903. His mother, Ida, who brought him to England the following year, was a sharply intelligent woman, half-French, who mixed with suffragettes and Fabians. His father, Richard Blair, was a mid-ranking civil servant for the British imperial government’s Opium Department who didn’t re-enter his son’s life until 1912, at which point he appeared “simply as a gruff-voiced elderly man forever saying ‘Don’t.’ ” In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith is haunted by his childhood betrayal of his mother and sister, but he can barely remember his father.
Orwell was thus born into what he called the “lower-upper-middle-class,” a troubled stratum of the English class system that had the pretensions and manners of the wealthy but not the capital, and therefore spent most of the money it did have on “keeping up appearances.” He later regarded his younger self, with embarrassment, shame and no small amount of contempt, as the kind of “odious little snob” that his class and education were designed to breed. “Your snobbishness, unless you root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.” Between the ages of eight and thirteen, he was a pupil at St. Cyprian’s, a small private school in Sussex that he loathed with alarming passion for the rest of his life. “Failure, failure, failure—failure behind me, failure ahead of me—that was by far the deepest conviction that I carried away.”
In the short autobiography that Orwell contributed to Twentieth Century Authors in 1940, he wrote, “I was educated at Eton, 1917–1921, as I had been lucky enough to win a scholarship, but I did no work there and learned very little, and I don’t feel that Eton has been much of a formative influence in my life.” While he probably exaggerated the contempt the fee-payers felt for the scholarship boys, it’s true that he was a mediocre student with a profound sense of unbelonging. Although he was known as a “Bolshie,” his alleged socialism was more of a fashionable pose than a deep conviction. One fellow pupil remembered him as “a boy with a permanent chip on the shoulder, always liking to find everything around him wrong, and giving the impression that he was there to put it right.” Another said, “he was more sardonic than rebellious, and standing aside from things a bit, observing—always observing.”
After Eton, Orwell rejected the chance to attend university and joined the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, where his mother had grown up: a surprising decision which he never tried to explain to his readers or friends. Orwell shelved his writing ambitions, but his five years in Burma did furnish him with the material for one decent novel (Burmese Days) and two very good essays (“A Hanging” and “Shooting an Elephant”) and a lifelong belief in the value of lived experience. Orwell disliked intellectuals, a word he tended to suspend in scare quotes, who relied on theory and speculation; he never truly believed something until he had, in some way, lived it. “In order to hate imperialism you have got to be part of it” is a fallacious generalisation, but it was true for him. In Orwell’s writing, you often meant I.
Burma functioned as aversion therapy. Through seeing how members of the ruling class were corrupted and confined by their abuse of power and the hypocrisy that cloaked it, Orwell developed a disgust for oppression of every stripe and briefly became a kind of anarchist before deciding that this was “sentimental nonsense.” He returned to England in 1927 (on leave, but he never went back) with “an immense weight of guilt that I had got to expiate.” This manifested as a masochistic desire to thrust himself into uncomfortable and even life-threatening situations. “How can you write about the poor unless you become poor yourself, even if it’s temporary?” he asked a friend. A librarian who met him during this period astutely noticed that he was a man “in the process of rearranging himself.”
With, by his own admission, “no interest in Socialism or any other economic theory,” he sought to submerge himself in the netherworld of the oppressed—those who, by having no jobs, property or status whatsoever, had transcended, or rather sunk below, the class system—by becoming a tramp in England and a dishwasher in Paris in the late 1920s. “It is a sort of world-within-a-world where everyone is equal, a small squalid democracy—perhaps the nearest thing to democracy that exists in England,” he wrote. Richard Rees, editor of The Adelphi, thought that Orwell chose this path “as a kind of penance or ablution to wash himself clean of the taint of imperialism.” This nostalgie de la boue, which foreshadowed Winston Smith’s expeditions into the prole district in Nineteen Eighty-Four, led him to write his first book, the memoir Down and Out in Paris and London.
Published in 1933, the book marked the birth of “George Orwell.” One reason he gave for using a pseudonym was a desire to spare his family any embarrassment if the book’s contents shocked them, or if his career as a writer fizzled out, but then he always disliked the name Eric and was hungry for reinvention. Taken from the River Orwell in Suffolk, this quintessentially English name squeezed out his alternative ideas, Kenneth Miles, P. S. Burton and H. Lewis Allways. And a good job, too: Allwaysian would not have been a graceful adjective.
By 1936, Orwell was the author of three novels, one non-fiction book, a few weak poems, and a trickle-to-a-stream of journalism, all of which did not yet add up to a viable career. He could only keep his head above water by taking on work as a teacher and a bookseller. That year, he painted a grimly exaggerated self-portrait in his third novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Gordon Comstock is a hard-up fugitive from the “shabby-genteel” middle classes who nurses unfulfilled literary ambitions and works in a bookshop to make ends meet. He is “not thirty yet, but moth-eaten already. Very pale, with bitter, ineradicable lines.” His self-pity, pessimism and misanthropy are so claustrophobic that his final surrender to the bourgeois conformity symbolised by the aspidistra house plant comes as a merciful release. Comstock is a gargoyle of Orwell: the man he might have become had he succumbed to bitterness and gloom.
In January 1936, Orwell accepted a commission from his publisher Victor Gollancz, a bullish, energetic Jewish socialist, to explore the plight of the industrial working class in the north of England. Published the following year, Part I of The Road to Wigan Pier is a sterling example of campaigning journalism, eliciting the reader’s empathy by interleaving hard data with a vivid sense of the sights, sounds, tastes and smells of working-class life. The image of a woman kneeling to unclog a waste pipe struck Orwell as such an indelible tableau of drudgery that he restaged it years later in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was captured by the look on her face: “She knew well enough what was happening to her.” Orwell wrote frequently about the power of the face to reveal personality in a profound way, whether it was Dickens, Hitler, a Spanish militiaman or Big Brother. In Airstrip One, Nineteen Eighty-Four’s version of Britain, the danger of physically betraying one’s true feelings is called “facecrime,” and the torturer O’Brien’s metaphor for tyranny is “a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”
Although he seriously downplays the pleasures of working-class life in order to emphasize the hardships, in Part I of The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell gives his subjects their due as human beings, not merely statistical units or emblems of the struggling masses. So when he told the working-class writer Jack Common, “I am afraid I have made rather a muck of parts of it,” he presumably meant the more essayistic Part II, which he later said wasn’t worth reprinting.
The opening stretch of Part II is a kind of me
moir, tracing the evolution of his political consciousness with punishing honesty. By saying that he was trained from birth to “hate, fear and despise the working class,” he implicitly makes the book a means of both education and penance. The rest, however, is a confused polemic. Orwell thought that if socialism was clearly necessary, then its unpopularity must be down to its image, which “drives away the very people who ought to be flocking to its support” by obscuring its fundamental ideals of justice, liberty and common decency. He identifies two major obstacles. One is socialism’s cult of the machine, which creates an unappetising vision of “aeroplanes, tractors and huge glittering factories of glass and concrete.” The other is middle-class crankishness. Barely noting the existence of working-class socialists or the trade union movement, Orwell launders his own eccentric prejudices through the imagined mindset of the common man, excoriating all the fetishes and foibles that allegedly make socialism unattractive to them (i.e., him), including vegetarians, teetotallers, nudists, Quakers, sandals, fruit juice, Marxist jargon, the word comrade, pistachio-coloured shirts, birth control, yoga, beards and Welwyn Garden City, the Hertfordshire town custom-built on utopian principles. Although Orwell claims in the book that he is only playing devil’s advocate, it is hard to escape the feeling that he has more fun insulting a kooky minority of socialists than defending other forms of socialism. After such a performance, for him to conclude the book by calling for “left-wingers of all complexions to drop their differences and hang together” is a bit rich.
Orwell made life difficult for Victor Gollancz, who had recently founded the Left Book Club with the Labour MP John Strachey and the political scientist Harold Laski in order to promote socialism. Laski, Britain’s most influential socialist intellectual, called Part I of The Road to Wigan Pier “admirable propaganda for our ideas” but Gollancz felt compelled to write a preface to the Left Book Club edition which distanced the club from the harsh judgements of Part II. In the preface, Gollancz put his finger on Orwell’s torturously paradoxical nature: “The truth is that he is at one and the same time an extreme intellectual and a violent anti-intellectual. Similarly he is a frightful snob—still (he must forgive me for saying this), and a genuine hater of every form of snobbery.” Until the end of his life, Orwell acknowledged that microbes of everything he criticised existed in himself. In fact, it was this awareness of his own flaws that inoculated him against utopian delusions of human perfectibility.
Gollancz also accused Orwell of never defining his preferred version of socialism, nor explaining how it might come about. According to Orwell’s bookshop colleague and subsequent editor Jon Kimche, Orwell was a “gut socialist”: “very decent but not attuned, I would say, to complicated political or military situations.” Yet however patchy and perverse his critique of socialism may have been, Orwell’s intentions were sincere. He believed that “nothing else can save us from the misery of the present or the nightmare of the future,” and if it failed to persuade ordinary Britons, then their discontent would surely be exploited by someone like Hitler. Socialism in Britain, he wrote, “smells of crankishness, machine-worship and the stupid cult of Russia. Unless you can remove that smell, and very rapidly, Fascism may win.”
Even as he wrote those words, Orwell was making plans to fight fascism more directly. Adelphi editor Richard Rees had known Orwell since 1930, but it was only when his friend went to Spain that Rees “began to realize he was extraordinary.”
“The Spanish Civil War is one of the comparatively few cases when the most widely accepted version of events has been written more persuasively by the losers of the conflict than by the winners,” wrote the historian Antony Beevor. What’s more, the most widely read memoir of the conflict, Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, was written by a man who fought with the losers of the losers: the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), known as the POUM. That is a very particular point of view. The POUM were small in size and influence, militarily weak and politically unpopular. So when contemporaries and, later, historians claimed that Orwell’s book gave a distorted picture of the war, they were not wrong, but it did tell the truth about Orwell’s war.
In February 1936, while Orwell was in Wigan, voters in the turbulent, five-year-old Spanish Republic narrowly elected a Popular Front coalition of anarchists, socialists, communists and liberal republicans, thus horrifying the church and the army, the twin pillars of reactionary monarchist sentiment. On July 17, after five months of instability, General Francisco Franco mounted a coup in Spanish Morocco and the Canary Islands which initiated a brutal civil war that split the country in two and became a proxy for the decade-defining struggle between fascism and communism. Germany and Italy immediately furnished Franco’s rebels with arms and personnel while Russia, thanks to Britain and France’s misguided arms embargo, became the Republic’s key ally, with dire consequences.
Orwell followed events in Spain very closely; the final pages of The Road to Wigan Pier include a reference to the battle for Madrid that November. He went to Spain with the expectation of fighting fascism and defending “common decency” but found himself plunged into a boiling alphabet soup of political acronyms which, for some people, would spell the difference between life and death. Explaining what Orwell called “a plague of initials” is a necessary evil, so I’ll be brief. The PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia) was the Catalan affiliate of the fast-growing Spanish communist party, by far the wealthiest and most well-armed faction thanks to Russian support. The anarchists were represented by the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation) and the CNT (National Confederation of Labour). The socialist UGT (General Union of Workers) had produced Spain’s latest prime minister, Francisco Largo Caballero. Then there was the POUM, led by forty-four-year-old Andrés Nin: a renegade workingclass Marxist party in the lonely and vulnerable position of opposing Stalin while falling out with Trotsky. These left-wing factions came to wage a civil war within the civil war. The communists, following Moscow’s new Popular Front strategy of an anti-fascist alliance with capitalists, insisted that winning the war had to take priority over revolution. The anarchists and the POUM felt that victory without revolution was unacceptable, and even impossible. The two positions could not be reconciled.
Orwell’s allegiance to the POUM feels, in retrospect, characteristically quixotic. In fact, he admitted later, “I was not only uninterested in the political situation but unaware of it.” Had he known more, he told Jack Common, he would have joined the anarchists, or even the communist-backed International Brigades, but the decision was effectively made for him. Seeking a letter of recommendation to smooth his passage to Spain, he had first approached Harry Pollitt, the devoutly Stalinist general secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Pollitt thought him politically unreliable (which of course he was, and proud of it) and turned him down. Orwell had better luck with Fenner Brockway of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a small, maverick socialist party aligned with the POUM, and so the die was cast. Both the POUM and the ILP had proven their honesty and courage, in Orwell’s eyes, by denouncing the ongoing show trials in Moscow.
Orwell’s brew of idealism, ignorance and grit was not unusual among the foreigners who flocked to Spain in 1936. The great left-wing cause of the day attracted all sorts: adventurers and dreamers, poets and plumbers, doctrinaire Marxists and frustrated misfits. One volunteer called it “a world where lost and lonely people could feel important.” Up to 35,000 men from fifty-three countries served in the International Brigades and another five thousand in militias affiliated with anarchists and the POUM. Over a thousand journalists and authors went, too, including Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and the poet Stephen Spender, who later wrote, “It was in part an anarchist’s war, a poet’s war.” Few, if any, foreigners understood the complexity of the political situation before they arrived, but still, said the journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, “it seemed certain that in Spain Good and Evil were at last joined
in bloody combat.”
Orwell left London on December 22 and travelled to Spain via Paris. There he visited the American novelist Henry Miller, who considered risking one’s life for a political cause an absurd folly and tried to talk him out of it. “Though he was a wonderful chap in his way, Orwell, in the end I thought him stupid,” Miller said decades later. “He was like so many English people, an idealist, and, it seemed to me, a foolish idealist.” Orwell crossed the border into Spain and reached Barcelona on Boxing Day.
Catalonia was a proudly quasi-independent region with a long history of anarchism. Franco’s July coup had sparked an anti-clerical revolution there, with many churches burned and clergy executed. The bourgeoisie were largely spared, but banks, factories, hotels, restaurants, cinemas and taxis were appropriated by the workingclass parties and blazoned with the initials of the CNT and FAI. Franz Borkenau, an Austrian writer Orwell came to know and admire, visited Spain in August and caught the tail end of the revolutionary fervour. “It was overwhelming,” he wrote. “It was as if we had been landed on a continent different from anything I had seen before.” Orwell’s schoolfriend Cyril Connolly had witnessed it, too, and it had momentarily knocked the snobbery out of him. “It is as if the masses, the mob in fact credited usually only with instincts of stupidity and persecution, should blossom into what is really a kind of flowering of humanity.”
It is unclear whether Orwell went to Spain to fight and ended up writing as well, or vice versa. John McNair, the ILP’s man in Barcelona, remembered Orwell walking into his office and declaring, “I have come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism,” but in Homage to Catalonia Orwell suggests that the journalism came first. Either way, within only a few days he had decided to do both.
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