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Orwell in Spain

Page 40

by George Orwell


  3. Phalangistes: the Falange Española was founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera (1903– 36), son of Spain’s dictator 1923–30, Primo de Rivera (1870–1930). He was tried and executed by the Republicans. The Falangists ‘saw themselves as an heroic élite of young men, whose mission was to release Spain from the poison of Marxism, as from what they took to be the second-rate, dull, provincialism of orthodox liberal values’ (Thomas, 115). On 18 April 1937 the Falange was united with all other Nationalist groups under Franco, whose brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano Súñer (b. 1901), was appointed Secretary-General.

  4. Elliot Paul (1891–1958) was an American autobiographical novelist and journalist. He served with the American Expeditionary Force in World War I and then worked in Europe for the Associated Press and Paris editions of US newspapers. With Eugene Jolas, he founded the influential journal transition (1927–38). His A Narrow Street (1942; US title, The Last Time I Saw Paris) is chiefly set in the rue de la Huchette, where he lived for eighteen years.

  5. ‘In the Balearics, while Majorca had been secured by Goded for the [Nationalist] rebels, the NCOs and troops of the garrison at Minorca prevented the success of the rising there… In Ibiza, the rising triumphed, as in the other small Balearic islands’ (Thomas, 242; July 1936). Bernanos states that 3,000 were killed by Nationalists (Thomas, 265, who also extracts from Bernanos horrifying details of summary executions, 259–62).

  6. Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) served several times as a Conservative minister and was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He became Prime Minister in 1937 and was associated with the appeasement of Hitler, though he initiated the rearmament of Britain. Following the failure of the Norwegian campaign in April 1940, he was much criticized and resigned in May. He then served the new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Writing to Orwell’s sister, Marjorie, from Marrakesh on 27 September 1938 (two days before the Munich Agreement was signed), Orwell’s wife, Eileen, remarked, ‘It’s very odd to feel that Chamberlain is our only hope, but I do believe he doesn’t want war either at the moment and certainly the man has courage’ (487).

  7. This was to be called ‘Socialism and War’. See Orwell’s letter to Leonard Moore, 28 June 1938 (458). The pamphlet was never published and no manuscript has been found.

  [452]

  To the Editor, The Listener

  16 June 1938

  Review of ‘Homage to Catalonia’

  Your reviewer’s1 treatment of facts is a little curious. In his review of my book Homage to Catalonia in The Listener of May 25 he uses about four-fifths of his space in resurrecting from the Communist Press the charge that the Spanish political party known as the P.O.U.M. is a ‘fifth column’ organisation in the pay of General Franco. He states first that this accusation was ‘hyperbolical’, but adds later that it was ‘credible’, and that the leaders of the P.O.U.M. were ‘little better than traitors to the Government cause’. Now, I leave on one side the question of how it can be credible that Franco’s ‘fifth column’ could be composed of the poorest of the working class, led by men most of whom had been imprisoned under the régime Franco was trying to restore, and at least one of whom was on Franco’s special list of ‘persons to be shot’. If your reviewer can believe in stories of that kind, he is entitled to do so. What he is not entitled to do is to repeat his accusation, which is incidentally an accusation against myself, without even indicating from whom it came or that I had had anything to say about it. He leaves it to be inferred all through that the absurd charges of treachery and espionage originated with the Spanish Government. But, as I pointed out in great detail (Chapter XI [pp. 190–215 above; CW, Appendix II] of my book), these charges never had any footing outside the Communist Press, nor was any evidence in support of them ever produced. The Spanish Government has again and again repudiated all belief in them, and has steadfastly refused to prosecute the men whom the Communist newspapers denounced. I gave chapter and verse from the Spanish Government’s statements, which have since been repeated several times. Your reviewer simply ignores all this, no doubt hoping that he has so effectually put people off reading the book that his misrepresentations will pass unnoticed.

  I do not expect or wish for ‘good’ reviews, and if your reviewer chooses to use most of his space in expressing his own political opinions, that is a matter between him and yourself. But I think I have a right to ask that when a book of mine is discussed at the length of a column there shall be at least some mention of what I have actually said.

  Aylesford

  George Orwell

  We have sent the above letter to our reviewer, who replies:

  Mr. Orwell’s letter ignores the major fact that conditions in Barcelona at one time became so bad that the Spanish Government was forced to send in armed police to put down what amounted to an insurrection. The leaders of that insurrection were the extreme anarchist elements allied with the P.O.U.M. It is not a question of ‘resurrecting’ charges from the Communist Press, but of historic fact. I have spent a considerable part of the Spanish war in Spain, and have not relied upon newspaper reports for my information.

  As I made clear in my review, it was not the intention of the rank and file of the P.O.U.M. to do other than fight against Franco. Being poor and ignorant men, the complexities of the revolutionary situation were beyond them; their leaders were to blame. As for being part of Franco’s fifth column, there is no doubt that whoever declined to co-operate with the central government and to abide by the law was, in fact, weakening the authority of that government and thus aiding the enemy. I submit that in time of war ignorance is as reprehensible as malicious sabotage. It is effect that matters, not the reasons for action.

  I am sorry if Mr. Orwell thinks that I wanted to put readers off a magnificently written book: I didn’t: I want people to read it even if, in my opinion, his analysis is wrong. It is the essence of a democracy in peace time that all views should be available to everybody.

  We are bound to say, in printing our reviewer’s reply, that we consider it hardly meets the points made by Mr. Orwell, to whom we express our regrets. – Editor, The Listener.2

  1. Philip Furneaux Jordan (1902–51) was a journalist, novelist and reviewer. He had been for a time on the staff of the Paris Daily Mail and edited the Riviera edition of the Chicago Tribune. In 1936 he joined the staff of the News Chronicle and served as its correspondent in Spain, 1936–7. He later became the News Chronicle’s features editor and then its foreign correspondent. In 1946–7 he was First Secretary at the British Embassy in Washington, and thereafter Public Relations Adviser to Prime Minister Clement Attlee. He also reviewed for The Times Literary Supplement – anonymously, as for The Listener.

  2. J. R. Ackerley (1896–1967) was literary editor, 1935–59. See Ackerley by Peter Parker (1989). The editor was R. S. Lambert.

  [456]

  Review of Spain’s Ordeal1 by Robert Sencourt; Franco’s Rule [anonymous]

  New English Weekly, 23 June 1938

  It is not easy for any thinking person to write in praise of dictatorships, because of the obvious fact that when any dictatorship gets into its stride the thinking person is the first to be liquidated. Possibly Mr. Wyndham Lewis still approves of Hitler, but does Hitler approve of Mr. Lewis? Which side would Hitler have been on in the recent set-to about Mr. Eliot’s portrait?2 It is true that over against the German dictatorship there is the Russian dictatorship, but to a western European that is less immediately menacing. We are still in the position of being able to admire it from beyond gunshot range.

  Consequently, bad as the pro-Government books on the Spanish war have been, the pro-Franco ones have been worse. All or almost all that I have seen – I except those of Professor Allison Peers, who is only rather tepidly pro-Franco – have been written by Roman Catholics. Mr. Sencourt’s book does not sink to the level of Arnold Lunn’s Spanish Rehearsal, but its general thesis is the same. Franco is a Christian gentleman, the Valencia Government are a gang of robbers, the Badajoz massacre didn’t hap
pen, Guernica was not bombed but wantonly burnt by Red militiamen – and so on and so forth. The truth is that all the haggling about ‘who started it’ and who committed which atrocity that goes on in books of this kind is a waste of time, because it does not tell you anything about the real conflict of motives. It would be much simpler if everyone would say outright, ‘My money is on Franco (or Negrín), atrocities or no atrocities.’ For that is what everyone who takes sides really thinks.

  Mr. Sencourt at any rate differs from Messrs. Lunn, Yeats-Brown, etc., in that he knows a great deal about Spain and loves the Spaniards, so that though he is hostile to the ‘Reds’ he is not vulgarly spiteful. But like almost everyone who has written of this war he suffers a great disadvantage from having only been able to study conditions on one side of the line. What he says of the pre-war situation is probably sound enough, but his account of internal conditions on the Government side during the war is very misleading. He enormously exaggerates the amount of civil disorder, and though he gives the main outline of the struggle between the various political parties he misunderstands the role and aim of most of them, because he feels himself obliged to equate ‘Red’ with ‘bad’. Communism he speaks of as though it were a disruptive force and nothing else, and he uses ‘Anarchism’ indifferently with ‘anarchy’, which is a hardly more correct use of words than saying that a Conservative is one who makes jam. Still, this is not an ill-natured or dishonest book, and to say that of a book on a political subject is a great deal nowadays.

  Franco’s Rule is simply an enormous list of atrocities committed in all the territories that Franco has over-run. There are long lists of people who have been shot, and such statements as that 23,000 were massacred in the province of Granada, etc., etc. Now, I do not say that these stories are untrue; obviously I have no means of judging, and at a guess I would say that some are true and some are not. And yet there is something that makes one very uneasy about the appearance of books of this kind.

  There is no doubt that atrocities happen, though when a war is over it is generally impossible to establish more than a few isolated cases. In the first few weeks of war, especially in a civil war, there are bound to be massacres of non-combatants, arson, looting and probably raping. If these things happen it is right that they should be recorded and denounced, but I am not so sure about the motives of people who are so enthralled by the subject that they will compile whole books of atrocity-stories. They usually tell you that they are trying to stir up hatred ‘against Fascism’ or ‘against Communism’. But you notice that they seldom hate these things sufficiently to fight against them themselves; I believe no soldier has ever compiled a book of atrocity-stories. One is left with the suspicion that some of the atrocity-mongers rather like writing about rapes and summary executions.

  And does anyone believe that in the long run this is the best way to combat either Fascism or what is bad in Communism? Mr. Arthur Koestler, whose nerves must have suffered horribly during his imprisonment by Franco, and who is to be forgiven much, tells us in his book, Spanish Testament, to abandon objectivity and cultivate hatred. The anonymous editor of Franco’s Rule also speaks contemptuously of ‘objectivity neurosis’. I wish these people would stop to reflect what they are doing. To fight, or even to ask others to fight, is one thing; to go round stirring up maniacal hatred is another. For:

  He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself: and if thou gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into thee.3

  This book is subtitled ‘Back to the Middle Ages’, which is unfair to the Middle Ages. There were no machine-guns in those days, and the Inquisition was a very amateurish business. After all, even Torquemada only burnt two thousand people in ten years. In modern Russia or Germany they’d say he wasn’t trying.

  1. The title of the book was originally given as Spanish Ordeal.

  2. Lewis’s portrait of T. S. Eliot was rejected by the hanging committee of the 1938 Royal Academy Exhibition. In a letter to Lewis of 21 April 1938, Eliot wrote that he would be quite willing to be known to posterity through this portrait. See Walter Michel, Wyndham Lewis, Paintings and Drawings (1971), 132 and plate 132.

  3. See review of Koestler’s Spanish Testament, n. 3, above.

  [462]

  Review of The Civil War in Spain by Frank Jellinek1

  New Leader, 8 July 1938

  Frank Jellinek’s book on the Paris Commune2 had its faults, but it revealed him as a man of unusual mind. He showed himself able to grasp the real facts of history, the social and economic changes that underlie spectacular events, without losing touch with the picturesque aspect which the bourgeois historian generally does so much better. On the whole his present book – The Civil War in Spain – bears out the promise of the other. It shows signs of haste, and it contains some misrepresentations which I will point out later, but it is probably the best book on the Spanish War from a Communist angle that we are likely to get for some time to come.

  Much the most useful part of the book is the earlier part, describing the long chain of causes that led up to the war and the fundamental issues at stake. The parasitic aristocracy and the appalling condition of the peasants (before the war 65 per cent of the population of Spain held 6.3 per cent of the land, while 4 per cent held 60 per cent of it), the backwardness of Spanish capitalism and the dominance of foreign capitalists, the corruption of the Church, and the rise of the Socialist and Anarchist labour movements – all these are treated in a series of brilliant chapters. The short biography which Mr. Jellinek gives of Juan March,3 the old tobacco-smuggler who is one of the men behind the Fascist rebellion (although, queerly enough, he is believed to be a Jew), is a wonderful story of corruption. It would be fascinating reading if March were merely a character in Edgar Wallace; unfortunately he happens to be a real man.

  The chapter on the Church does not leave much doubt as to why practically all the churches in Catalonia and eastern Aragón were burnt at the outbreak of war. Incidentally, it is interesting to learn that, if Mr. Jellinek’s figures are correct, the world organisation of the Jesuits only numbers about 22,000 people. For sheer efficiency they must surely have all the political parties in the world beaten hollow. But the Jesuits’ ‘man of affairs’ in Spain is, or was, on the board of directors of forty-three companies!

  At the end of the book there is a well-balanced chapter on the social changes that took place in the first few months of the war, and an appendix on the collectivisation decree in Catalonia. Unlike the majority of British observers, Mr. Jellinek does not under-rate the Spanish Anarchists. In his treatment of the P.O.U.M., however, there is no doubt that he is unfair, and – there is not much doubt of this either – intentionally unfair.

  Naturally I turned first of all to the chapter describing the fighting in Barcelona in May, 1937, because both Mr. Jellinek and myself were in Barcelona at the time, and this gave me a measure of checking his accuracy. His account of the fighting is somewhat less propagandist than those that appeared in the Communist Press at the time, but it is certainly one-sided and would be very misleading to anyone who knew nothing of the facts. To begin with, he appears at times to accept the story that the P.O.U.M. was really a disguised Fascist organisation, and refers to ‘documents’ which ‘conclusively proved’ this and that, without telling us any more about these mysterious documents – which, in fact, have never been produced. He even refers to the celebrated ‘N’ document4 (though admitting that ‘N’ probably did not stand for Nin), and ignores the fact that Irujo,5 the Minister of Justice, declared this document to be ‘worthless’, i.e., a forgery. He states merely that Nin was ‘arrested’, and does not mention that Nin disappeared and was almost certainly murdered. Moreover, he leaves the chronology uncertain and – whether intentionally or not – gives the impression that the alleged discovery of a Fascist plot, the arrest of Nin, etc., took place immediately after the May fighting.

  This point is important. The suppression of the P.O.U.M. did not occur immediately a
fter the May fighting. There was a five weeks’ interval. The fighting ended on May 7 and Nin was arrested on June 15. The suppression of the P.O.U.M. only occurred after, and almost certainly as a result of, the change in the Valencia Government. I have noticed several attempts in the Press to obscure these dates. The reason is obvious enough; however, there can be no doubt about the matter, for all the main events were recorded in the newspapers at the time.

  Curiously enough, about June 20, the Manchester Guardian correspondent in Barcelona sent here a despatch6 in which he contradicted the absurd accusations against the P.O.U.M. – in the circumstances a very courageous action. This correspondent must almost certainly have been Mr. Jellinek himself. What a pity that for propaganda purposes he should now find it necessary to repeat a story which after this lapse of time seems even more improbable.

  His remarks on the P.O.U.M. occupy a considerable share of the book, and they have an air of prejudice which would be obvious even to anyone who knew nothing whatever about the Spanish political parties. He thinks it necessary to denigrate even useful work such as that done by Nin as Councillor of Justice, and is careful not to mention that the P.O.U.M. took any serious part either in the first struggles against the Fascist rising or at the front. And in all his remarks about the ‘provocative attitude’ of the P.O.U.M. newspapers it hardly seems to occur to him that there was any provocation on the other side. In the long run this kind of thing defeats its own object. Its effect on me, for instance, is to make me think: ‘If I find that this book is unreliable where I happen to know the facts, how can I trust it where I don’t know the facts?’ And many others will think the same.

 

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