George Orwell: A Life in Letters

by Peter Davison

  I have still not quite recovered from the wound I got in Spain, but when I am up to writing again I will try and write something for you, as you suggested in your earlier letter. I would like to be frank with you, however, and therefore I must tell you that in Spain I was serving in the militia of the P.O.U.M., which as you know° doubt know, has been bitterly denounced by the Communist Party and was recently suppressed by the Government; also that after what I have seen I am more in agreement with the policy of the P.O.U.M. than with that of the Communist Party. I tell you this because it may be that your paper would not care to have contributions from a P.O.U.M. member 1, and I do not wish to introduce myself to you under false pretences.

  The above is my permanent address.

  Yours fraternally,

  George Orwell

  [LO, pp. 99–100; XI, 374B, p. 37; typewritten]

  1.The journal responded that Orwell’s association with the POUM ensured that International Literature could ‘have no relations’ with him (XI, 362, p. 12).

  To Rayner Heppenstall*

  31 July 1937

  The Stores

  Wallington

  Dear Rayner,

  Thanks so much for your letter. I was glad to hear from you. I hope Margaret 1 is better. It sounds dreadful, but from what you say I gather that she is at any rate up and about.

  We had an interesting but thoroughly bloody time in Spain. Of course I would never have allowed Eileen to come nor probably gone myself if I had foreseen the political developments, especially the suppression of the P.O.U.M., the party in whose militia I was serving. It was a queer business. We started off by being heroic defenders of democracy and ended by slipping over the border with the police panting on our heels 2 Eileen was wonderful, in fact actually seemed to enjoy it. But though we ourselves got out all right nearly all our friends and acquaintances are in jail and likely to be there indefinitely, not actually charged with anything but suspected of ‘Trotskyism.’ The most terrible things were happening even when I left, wholesale arrests, wounded men dragged out of hospitals and thrown into jail, people crammed together in filthy dens where they have hardly room to lie down, prisoners beaten and half starved etc., etc. Meanwhile it is impossible to get a word about this mentioned in the English press, barring the publications of the I.L.P., which is affiliated to the P.O.U.M. I had a most amusing time with the New Statesman about it. As soon as I got out of Spain I wired from France asking if they would like an article and of course they said yes, but when they saw my article was on the suppression of the P.O.U.M. they said they couldn’t print it. To sugar the pill they sent me to review a very good book which appeared recently, The Spanish Cockpit,3 which blows the gaff pretty well on what has been happening. But once again when they saw my review they couldn’t print it as it was ‘against editorial policy,’ but they actually offered to pay for the review all the same— practically hush-money. I am also having to change my publisher, at least for this book.4 Gollancz is of course part of the Communism-racket, and as soon as he heard I had been associated with the P.O.U.M. and Anarchists and had seen the inside of the May riots in Barcelona, he said he did not think he would be able to publish my book, though not a word of it was written yet. I think he must have very astutely foreseen that something of the kind would happen, as when I went to Spain he drew up a contract undertaking to publish my fiction but not other books. However I have two other publishers on my track and I think my agent is being clever and has got them bidding against one another. I have started my book but of course my fingers are all thumbs at present.

  My wound was not much, but it was a miracle it did not kill me. The bullet went clean through my neck but missed everything except one vocal cord, or rather the nerve governing it, which is paralysed. At first I had no voice at all, but now the other vocal cord is compensating and the damaged one may or may not recover. My voice is practically normal but I can’t shout to any extent. I also can’t sing, but people tell me this doesn’t matter. I am rather glad to have been hit by a bullet because I think it will happen to us all in the near future and I am glad to know that it doesn’t hurt to speak of. What I saw in Spain did not make me cynical but it does make me think that the future is pretty grim. It is evident that people can be deceived by the anti-Fascist stuff exactly as they were deceived by the gallant little Belgium stuff, and when war comes they will walk straight into it. I don’t, however, agree with the pacifist attitude, as I believe you do. I still think one must fight for Socialism and against Fascism, I mean fight physically with weapons, only it is as well to discover which is which. I want to meet Holdaway5 and see what he thinks about the Spanish business. He is the only more or less orthodox Communist I have met whom I could respect. It will disgust me if I find he is spouting the same defence of democracy and Trotsky-Fascist stuff as the others.

  I would much like to see you, but I honestly don’t think I shall be in London for some time, unless absolutely obliged to go up on business. I am just getting going with my book, which I want to get done by Xmas, also very busy trying to get the garden etc. in trim after being so long away. Anyway keep in touch and let me know your address. I can’t get in touch with Rees*. He was on the Madrid front and there was practically no communication. I heard from Murry* who seemed in the weeps about something. Au revoir.

  Yours

  Eric

  [XI, 381, pp. 53–4; typewritten]

  1.Mrs Rayner Heppenstall.

  2.In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell tells how his hotel room was searched by six plain-clothes policemen, who took away ‘every scrap of paper we possessed’, except, fortunately, Eileen’s and his passports and their cheque-book. He learned later that the police had seized some of his belongings, including a bundle of dirty linen, from the Sanatorium Maurín (see VI, p. 164). More than fifty years later, a document was discovered by Karen Hatherley in the National Historical Archive, in Madrid, that precisely confirmed this (XI, 374A, pp. 30–7).

  3.Orwell’s review of The Spanish Cockpit by Franz Borkenau appears in XI, 379, pp. 51–2. When reviewing his The Communist International in 1938 he wrote that he still thought the former ‘the best book on the subject’. Dr Borkenau (1900–57) was an Austrian sociologist and political writer. From 1921–29 he was a member of the German Communist Party. He emigrated to Britain in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. Orwell greatly admired him and his work.

  4.Homage to Catalonia.

  5.N.A. Holdaway was a schoolmaster and Marxist theorist, a member of the Independent Socialist Party, contributor to The Adelphi, and Director of the Adelphi Centre.

  To Charles Doran*

  2 August 1937

  The Stores

  Wallington

  Dear Doran,

  I don’t know your address, but I expect they will know it at the I.L.P. summer school, where I am going on Thursday. I was also there yesterday, to hear John McNair* speak.

  I was very relieved when I saw young Jock Branthwaite,1 who has been staying with us, and learned that all of you who wished to had got safely out of Spain. I came up to the front on June 15th to get my medical discharge, but couldn’t come up to the line to see you because they kept sending me about from hospital to hospital. I got back to Barcelona to find that the P.O.U.M. had been suppressed in my absence, and they had kept it from the troops so successfully that on June 20th as far down the line as Lérida not a soul had heard about it, though the suppression had taken place on the 16th–17th. My first intimation was walking into the Hotel Continental and having Eileen and a Frenchman named Pivert,2 who was a very good friend to everyone during the trouble, rush up to me, seize me each by one arm and tell me to get out. Kopp* had just recently been arrested in the Continental owing to the staff ringing up the police and giving him away. MacNair°, Cottman* and I had to spend several days on the run, sleeping in ruined churches etc., but Eileen stayed in the hotel and, beyond having her room searched and all my documents seized, was not molested, possibly because the police were using her
as a decoy duck for MacNair° and me. We slipped away very suddenly on the morning of the 23rd, and crossed the frontier without much difficulty. Luckily there was a first class and a dining car on the train, and we did our best to look like ordinary English tourists, which was the safest thing to do. In Barcelona one was fairly safe during the daytime, and Eileen and I visited Kopp several times in the filthy den where he and scores of others, including Milton,3 were imprisoned. The police had actually gone to the length of arresting the wounded P.O.U.M. men out of the Maurín [Hospital], and I saw two men in the jail with amputated legs; also a boy of about ten. A few days ago we got some letters, dated July 7th, which Kopp* had somehow managed to send out of Spain. They included a letter of protest to the Chief of Police. He said that not only had he and all the others been imprisoned for 18 days (much longer now, of course) without any trial or charge, but that they were being confined in places where they had hardly room to lie down, were half starved and in many cases beaten and insulted. We sent the letter on to McNair, and I believe after discussing the matter Maxton4 has arranged to see the Spanish ambassador and tell him that if something is not done, at any rate for the foreign prisoners, he will spill the beans in Parliament. McNair also tells me that there is a credible report in the French papers that the body of Nin,5 also I think other P.O.U.M. leaders, has been found shot in Madrid. I suppose it will be ‘suicide,’ or perhaps appendicitis again.6

  Meanwhile it seems almost impossible to get anything printed about all this . . . [Here Orwell repeats what he had written to Rayner Heppenstall* on 31 July 1937 about the reactions of the New Statesman and Gollancz.*]

  I went up to Bristol with some others to take part in a protest meeting about Stafford Cottman* being expelled from the Y.C.L.7 with the words ‘we brand him as an enemy of the working class’ and similar expressions. Since then I heard that the Cottmans’ house had been shadowed by members of the Y.C.L. who attempt to question everyone who comes in and out. What a show! To think that we started off as heroic defenders of democracy and only six months later were Trotsky-Fascists sneaking over the border with the police on our heels. Meanwhile being a Trotsky-Fascist doesn’t seem to help us with the pro-Fascists in this country. This afternoon Eileen and I had a visit from the vicar, who doesn’t at all approve of our having been on the Government side. Of course we had to own up that it was true about the burning of the churches, but he cheered up a lot on hearing they were only Roman Catholic churches.

  Let me know how you get on. Eileen wishes to be remembered.

  Yours

  Eric Blair

  P.S. [handwritten] I forgot to say that when in Barcelona I wanted greatly to write to you all & warn you, but I dared not, because I thought any such letter would simply draw undesirable attention to the man it was addressed to.

  [XI, 386, pp. 64–6; typewritten]

  1.Jock Branthwaite (d. 1997) was the son of a miner. He served with Orwell in Spain. He remembered copies of The Road to Wigan Pier arriving at the Front and said the book did not offend his working-class sensibilities. He told Stephen Wadhams that Orwell was not a snob: ‘I thought he was a wonderful man.’ He got out of Spain on the last refugee boat from Barcelona to Marseilles. (See Remembering Orwell, pp. 83–4, 93, 99.)

  2.Marceau Pivert was a contributor to Controversy.

  3.Harry Milton was the only American serving with Orwell’s unit. He and Orwell were talking when Orwell was shot through the throat (Homage to Catalonia, p. 138). He was Trotskyist and regarded Orwell as ‘politically virginal’ on arrival in Spain. They spent hours together discussing politics. Orwell was ‘as cool as a cucumber’ and ‘a very disciplined individual’ (see Remembering Orwell, pp. 81, 85, 90).

  4.James Maxton (1885–1946), Independent Labour Party MP, 1922–46; Chairman of the ILP, 1926–31, 1934–39.

  5.Andrés Nin (1892–1937), leader of the POUM; he had once been Trotsky’s private secretary in Moscow, but broke with him when Trotsky spoke critically of the POUM. He was murdered by the Communists after the customary Soviet interrogation in May 1937. (See Thomas, p. 523.)

  6.This refers to Bob Smillie, thrown into jail in Valencia where according to his captors he died of appendicitis. (See Homage to Catalonia, p. 149.)

  7.Young Communist League.

  Orwell and The Road to Wigan Pier were subjected to vicious attacks by Communists and the extreme Left Press. Ruth Dudley Edwards describes Orwell as being ‘blackguarded’ by Harry Pollitt, leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the Daily Worker, 17 March 1937 (Victor Gollancz (1987), p. 248). Pollitt wrote: ‘Here is George Orwell, a disillusioned little middle-class boy who, seeing through imperialism, decided to discover what Socialism had to offer . . . a late imperialist policeman . . . . If ever snobbery had its hallmark placed upon it, it is by Mr Orwell. . . . I gather that the chief thing that worries Mr Orwell is the “smell” of the working-class, for smells seem to occupy the major portion of the book. . . . One thing I am certain of, and it is this – if Mr Orwell could only hear what the Left Book Club circles will say about this book, then he would make a resolution never to write again on any subject that he does not understand.’ Attacks on Orwell continued during the summer and finally Orwell sought Gollancz’s help.

  To Victor Gollancz*

  20 August 1937

  The Stores

  Wallington

  Dear Mr Gollancz,

  I do not expect you will have seen the enclosed cutting, as it does not refer to anything you published for me.

  This (see underlined words) is the—I think—third reference in the Daily Worker to my supposedly saying that the working classes ‘smell.’ As you know I have never said anything of the kind, in fact have specifically said the opposite. What I said in Chapter VIII of Wigan Pier, as you may perhaps remember, is that middle-class people are brought up to believe that the working classes ‘smell,’ which is simply a matter of observable fact. Numbers of the letters I received from readers of the book referred to this and congratulated me on pointing it out. The statement or implication that I think working people ‘smell’ is a deliberate lie aimed at people who have not read this or any other of my books, in order to give them the idea that I am a vulgar snob and thus indirectly hit at the political parties with which I have been associated. These attacks in the Worker only began after it became known to the Communist Party that I was serving with the P.O.U.M. militia.

  I have no connection with these people (the Worker staff) and nothing I said would carry any weight with them, but you of course are in a different position. I am very sorry to trouble you about what is more or less my own personal affair, but I think perhaps it might be worth your while to intervene and stop attacks of this kind which will not, of course, do any good to the books you have published for me or may publish for me in the future. If therefore at any time you happen to be in touch with anyone in authority on the Worker staff, I should be very greatly obliged if you would tell them two things:

  1. That if they repeat this lie about my saying the working classes ‘smell’ I shall publish a reply with the necessary quotations, and in it I shall include what John Strachey1 said to me on the subject just before I left for Spain (about December 20th). Strachey will no doubt remember it, and I don’t think the C.P. would care to see it in print.

  2. This is a more serious matter. A campaign of organised libel is going on against people who were serving with the P.O.U.M. in Spain. A comrade of mine, a boy of eighteen whom I knew in the line,2 was recently not only expelled from his branch of the Y.C.L. for his association with the P.O.U.M., which was perhaps justifiable as the P.O.U.M. and C.P. policies are quite incompatible, but was also described in a letter as ‘in the pay of Franco.’ This latter statement is quite a different matter. I don’t know whether it is libellous within the meaning of the act, but I am taking counsel’s opinion, as, of course, the same thing (ie. that I am in Fascist pay) is liable to be said about myself. Perhaps again, if you are speaking to anyone in aut
horitative position, you could tell them that in the case of anything actionable being said against me, I shall not hesitate to take a libel action immediately. I hate to take up this threatening attitude, and I should hate still more to be involved in litigation, especially against members of another working-class party, but I think one has a right to defend oneself against these malignant personal attacks which, even if it is really the case that the C.P. is entirely right and the P.O.U.M. and I.L.P. entirely wrong, cannot in the long run do any good to the working-class cause. You see here (second passage underlined) the implied suggestion that I did not ‘pull my weight’ in the fight against the Fascists. From this it is only a short step to calling me a coward, a shirker etc., and I do not doubt these people would do so if they thought it was safe.

  I am extremely sorry to put this kind of thing upon you, and I shall understand and not be in any way offended if you do not feel you can do anything about it.3 But I have ventured to approach you because you are my publisher and may, perhaps, feel that your good name is to some extent involved with mine.

  Yours sincerely

  Eric Blair

  [X, 390, pp.72–4; typewritten]

  1.John Strachey (1901–63), political theorist, Labour MP, 1929–31, then stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for Oswald Mosley’s New Party (of Fascist inclination), then supported Communism. He was Labour Minister of Food, 1945–50 and Secretary of State for War, 1950–51.

  2.Stafford Cottman.*

  3.Gollancz told Orwell he was passing his letter on ‘to the proper quarter’. That proved to be the Communist Party’s offices in King Street, London. To Pollitt, he wrote, ‘My dear Harry, you should see this letter from Orwell. I read it to John [Strachey] over the telephone and he assures me that he is quite certain that he said nothing whatever indiscreet.’ What Strachey said is not known. However, the attacks did, for the moment, cease.