Homage to Catalonia
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By George Orwell
First published in 1938
In December 1936, more than 10 years before he was to write Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell went to Spain to report on the civil war between Republican loyalists and insurgent Fascist generals led by Francisco Franco.
This was no ordinary civil war. Spain’s popularly elected leftist government drew arms and support from Soviet Russia, while Mussolini and Hitler supplied the Fascists. The war gripped the attention of the world. It excited grand passions. It was impossible to be neutral about it.
Orwell—his real name was Eric Blair—came under Spain’s spell. Stirred by the heady egalitarian spirit of revolutionary Barcelona, the principal city of the region known as Catalonia, he enlisted in a militia unit linked to a Trotskyist political party. For three months he fought in the trenches of the Aragon front. Then he returned to Barcelona, where he witnessed an outbreak of internecine street violence between contending leftist groups. Back at the front, he was shot in the neck by a sniper, the bullet hitting a vocal cord; his doctors assured him he’d never speak again.
Soon after, when the Communists suppressed the Trotskyists on the pretext that they were consorting with the Fascists—a ridiculous charge— Orwell, fearing arrest, fled across the French border and thence to England. In London, he wrote, were “the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”
On his return, with the outcome of the war still in doubt, Orwell wrote about what he’d seen in a plain, forthright style almost wholly free of sentimentalism and cant: Homage to Catalonia, one critic has written, is “perhaps the best book that exists on the Spanish Civil War.” Wrote another, Lionel Trilling, “This book is one of the important documents of our time.”
Though permeated by the mud, lice, boredom, and fatigue of front line combat, Homage to Catalonia is no antiwar tract. As horrifying as the war was, Orwell did not regard it as meaningless. He had signed up to help save Spain from Franco. He knew there was plenty of killing to be done. He was not a pacifist. At one point, he writes of a “trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one’s heart leap as guns always do.” The sight revived in him, he wrote, “that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.”
Orwell’s chronicle is redolent of his fondness for the Spanish people, “with their innate decency and their ever-present Anarchist tinge” (even as he missed good, sturdy English justice); just a hint of travelogue here, overlays the gritty combat narrative.
But what almost compels a reading of Orwell’s book today is his incisive account of the infighting that racked the loyalist Left even as it waged war on the Right. Here, Orwell and his time resonate with us and ours. For in dissecting the Communist subjugation of the other loyalist parties, he exposes a recurrent and troubling axiom of modern political life: The more tender and progressive the ideals professed, the more they’re apt to cover up cruelty, ruthlessness and lies. It’s a theme he further developed in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. It can scarcely bear too much repeating today.
Yet Orwell was himself an idealist. He had “breathed the air of equality,” he wrote. “The Spanish militias, while they lasted, were a sort of microcosm of a classless society ... where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking ... It deeply attracted me.”
But above all, Orwell was honest: He showed it was possible to hold passionate convictions—and even be ready to kill or be killed for them—without ever letting them cloud his clear vision or inhibit his telling of what was true.
Civilization and its Discontents
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By Sigmund Freud
First published in 1930
Freud has taken his lumps of late. Sleep lab data may supply a better way to understand dreams, many now suspect, than do his notions of wishfulfillment and repression. Discoveries in brain chemistry give his theories of neurosis, once revolutionary, a musty, shopworn air.
Still, there were good reasons Freud enjoyed intellectual popularity for so long, and they owe as much to the sheer force of his personality, and the eloquence with which he expressed it in print, as to the validity of his theories. We see an example of this in Civilization and Its Discontents, one of Freud’s last works, published in 1930.
Men and women stand in continual tension with society, Freud wrote. We may wish to act on our instinctual sex drive unhindered, yet family, society and personal conscience restrain us. We may wish to string up our enemies from the nearest tree, but the force of law and the opinion of our fellows stops us. Civilization cramps our style, and so stirs in us a malaise. We each deal with this conflict differently, adopting one or another strategy for reconciling personal needs with the dictates of society. Invariably, there’s a price to pay, often in the form of neurosis.
Therein lies the essence of this slim book. But its rewards lie less in its ideas than in the opportunity it furnishes to brush up against the author’s formidable personality. Freud is all force, his words brimming with confidence and authority. There are few appeals to case histories or scientific studies here, no mind-numbing recitation of bibliographic sources.
“What we call happiness,” he declares, “comes from the (preferably sudden) satisfaction of needs which have been damned up to a high degree, and it is from its nature only possible as an episodic phenomenon. When any situation that is desired by the pleasure principle is prolonged, it only produces a feeling of mild contentment. We are so made that we can derive intense enjoyment only from a contrast and very little from a state of things.”
We are so made ... as if he were privy to the blueprints!
The whole book is written that way. When Freud does deign to hedge his bets, you notice it—as when he suggests a link between family structure and the weak role of smell, among humans, in sexual excitement: “This,” he admits, “is only a theoretical speculation.” (Of course, he adds immediately, it’s “important enough to deserve careful checking.”)
But this hint of humility startles by its rarity. More often, we feel in the presence of an all-wise father, uttering truths culled from infinite human experience, and from the orbit of whose intellect wrest oneself: “An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one’s life,” Freud declares, “but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment.”
Sometimes, his counsel sounds like that of an Eastern guru: “All suffering is nothing else than sensation it only exists in so far as we feel it.”
Sometimes Freud is prophetic, as when—almost half a century before the discovery of enkephalins in the brain—he posits “substances in the chemistry of our own bodies” that can leave us intoxicated.
Herr Freud on technology: “This newly won power over space and time, this subjugation of the forces of nature, which is the fulfillment of a longing that goes back thousands of years, has not increased the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which [we] may expect from life and has not made [us] feel happier.”
Civilization, says Freud, is the arena for the great “struggle between Eros and Death,” between the constructive and destructive forces forever at war within the human species. “And it is this battle of the giants,” he says, in a swipe at traditional religion, “that our nurse-maids try to appease with their lullaby about Heaven.”
Arrowsmith
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By Sinclair Lewis
First published in 1925
Subtle it ain’t.
The characters in Arrowsmith, Sinclair Lewis’ novel about medical research, are, well, characters. Almus Pickerbaugh i
s the fervent public health director out to cheerlead and cow his street-spitting fellow citizens to the One True Way of Health. Max Gottlieb is the ascetic researcher devoted to Truth. Gustaf Sondelius is the boisterous, big-hearted, hard-drinking Swedish field scientist who can charm rats into turning over dead in their plague-bearing tracks. So faithfully do Lewis’ characters run true to type that when one of them does not—for instance, the officious research director Rippletown Holabird (love those names?)—you want to cheer.
No, don’t read Arrowsmith for nuances of personality.
And don’t read it for the plot, the twists and turns of which are often telegraphed in advance and are not entirely believable at that. As when the book’s idealistic protagonist, Martin Arrowsmith, by now a scientist of international standing, treks off to the Vermont Woods to set up his test tubes untrammeled by bureaucratic overseers, discarding rich wife and child along the way.
Nor will the reader encounter great profundity here. Nor depths of poignancy. Nor sublime revelations.
No, one reads Lewis in general, and Arrowsmith in particular, for the chance to view the world through a rare, finely polished lens that shows up, in sometimes painful relief, the frailties of human nature and the superficialities of social intercourse.
Born in the tiny red brick town of Elk Mills in the fictional Midwestern state of Winnemac, Martin Arrowsmith wants to be a doctor. He enrolls in the state medical school, where he comes under the spell of the great Gottlieb, a cranky German Jew of incisive intellect and driving curiosity. Martin vacillates, as he does all through the novel, between the call of the laboratory and that of the more lucrative examining bench. During his internship, he meets a no-nonsense nursing student, Leora, from a midwestern outback more provincial even than his own, marries her, and sets up a practice in her home town of Wheatsylvania, N.D.
Soon enough, wincing under the lash of small-town life, he lands a minor public health position as aide to the unforgettable Almus Pickerbaugh, poemslinger extraordinaire. There, between arresting public spitters and making up batches of vaccine, he squeezes in a little research. His work comes to the attention of Gottlieb, now installed at the prestigious McGurk Institute in New York. Arrowsmith joins his mentor there, only to find the tensions between the purity of research and the grubby realities of the outside world as strong as ever.
It is an inner story, this battle for Martin’s soul, that might seem ripe for a more “literary” telling, full of dark brooding. But Lewis tells it comically, an ear for dialogue his best instrument for puncturing balloons of pomposity, materialism and superficiality. As when Martin arrives in Wheatsylvania and meets Leora’s mother for the first time.
“Did you have a comfortable trip on the train?”
“Oh, yes, it was—well, it was pretty crowded.”
“Oh, was it crowded?”
“Yes, there were a lot of people traveling.”
“Were there? I suppose. Yes. Sometimes I wonder where all the people can be going that you see going places all the time. Did you - was it very cold in the cities - Minneapolis and St. Paul?”
“Yes, it was pretty cold.”
“Oh, was it cold?”
Later, while working for Pickerbaugh, Martin encounters the cloddish Irv Watters, a classmate from back in medical school. Watters advises him: “You want to join the country club and take up golf. Best opportunity in the world to meet the substantial citizens. I’ve picked up more than one highclass patient there.”
Near novel’s end, now married to Joyce, a wealthy society woman, Martin is caught up in his research, stays all night in the lab and misses yet another dinner party. Joyce is incensed. “Can you imagine how awful it was for Mrs. Thorn to be short a man at the last moment?”
Arrowsmith is full of that. It’s grand good fun to sneer and snicker at Lewis’ middle Americans. Until you realize they’re just like you.
Roughing It
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By Mark Twain
First published in 1873
Roughing It is grand fun.
There’s Mark Twain, age 26, starting a campfire. There’s Mark Twain, failing to mind it. There’s a whole pine forest in the Nevada Territory going up in flames.
Another time the distractible Twain releases the bridles of the horses— who wander off, leaving him and his friends without food or water in the middle of a blizzard ...
Lapses like these may well account for Twain’s checkered employment history, as riverboat pilot, grocery clerk, law student, blacksmith, printer. He was, apparently, wholly unsuited to any life’s work—any, that is, but expressing the soul of Middle America in the 19th Century.
Roughing It is travelogue, autobiography, history and compendium of Wild West lore all in one: The author, accompanying his brother to Nevada in the summer of 1861, stays six years. Beginning with the three-week overland stage crossing from St. Joseph, Mo., Roughing It is the hearty, always entertaining chronicle of his adventures. In the full exuberance of youth, Twain already commands considerable literary powers.
Many of the stock characters of Hollywood Western lore make early appearances in these pages: Slade, the ultimate desperado—cold-blooded killer of 26 men, who ultimately dies on the gallows at the hands of vigilantes grown weary of his excesses of frontier bullyism; Slade’s wife, “a brave, loving, spirited woman,” who rides to the rescue, but too late.
And the Pony Express rider who gallops on alone, astride a “little wafer of a racing saddle,” with letters at $5 postage each strapped under his thighs250 miles a day across the prairies and deserts. As Twain and the others aboard the overland stage spot him in the distance, “every neck is stretched further, and every eye strained wider. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves.”
Much of the author’s abundant fancy mixes with facts here. And yet with every tall tale, every flight of hyperbole, the reader encounters a telltale clue to set the record straight. Twain gives a man’s name as “Brown,” but is quick to inform us that “any name would do.” He tells us that a toothless old woman first reported as 165 years old may not be: “Being in calmer mood, now, I voluntarily knock off 100 years.” Despite humor and snap, Twain is no journalistic airhead. Wild yarns interspersed with soberly objective reportage yield few doubts as to which is which.
That’s important: Because as entertaining as all this is, the book’s 79 little chapters also come down to us as a potentially invaluable resource on Americana. Even offhand comments reveal much: For instance, wearied of hearing the same Horace Greeley story half a dozen times, Twain pleads with yet another prospective teller to “rather tell me about young George Washington and his little hatchet for a change”—suggesting how legendary that story had already become.
And has any historian ever given us a better-drawn portrait of the American boom town than Twain’s of Virginia City and the other towns of the Comstock Lode? Has any naturalist better briefly captured the beauty of a still-virgin Lake Tahoe? Has any linguist offered a funnier celebration of Western slang than the scene in which “Scotty” Briggs makes funeral arrangements with the new pastor just in from back East?
Twain explores terrain almost wholly male: To read it, one would think these lusty boom towns had no dance-hall girls, no wives, no mothers,—no women in any capacity whatever—and that neither sex nor the thought of it distracts these fortune hunters. How much this betrays what one critic has called Twain’s “sexual prudishness,” how much the true absence of women, and how much the single-minded hold that silver exerted on men’s imaginations is not clear. Clear only is that Twain loved it: “It was a wild, free, disorderly, grotesque society!” he writes. “Swarming hosts of stalwart men—nothing juvenile, nothing feminine anywhere!”
But making good sport of the silver-lusting world around him, Twain never places himself outside or above it. He is a participant, charged with the same fever. Once, prospecting for gold, he mistakes a
piece of mica-encrusted granite for the noble metal, and is promptly swept away with dreams of riches. He adds later: “Like the rest of the world, I still go on underrating men of gold and glorifying men of mica.”
Roughing It is not mica, yet not gold, either; it doesn’t “weigh” enough. Think of it, instead, as a string of pearls—fine, fair and lustrous.
VI
Lighter Fare
Good Reads, Best Sellers
A Study in Scarlet — Arthur Conan Doyle
The Song of Hiawatha — Henry W. Longfellow
The Rise of David Levinsky — Abraham Cahan
Java Head — Joseph Hergesheimer
Mr. Pottermack’s Oversight — R. Austin Freeman
A Bell for Adano — John Hersey
The Martian Chronicles — Ray Bradbury
Gentleman’s Agreement — Laura Z. Hobson
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None among the volumes in this group makes serious claim to inclusion in the Great Canon of Western literature. Each, rather, occupies a smaller niche, being read today for its contribution to a particular genre, such as the detective story; or for how it illuminates a special moment in time or place; or for the few moments of fame it enjoyed as a best seller. These are, in short, lighter, smaller works. Of course, as Daniel Webster said of his alma mater, Dartmouth: “It is, sir, a small college, and yet there are those who love it.”
A Study in Scarlet
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By Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
First published in 1887
He never lived, say the miserly in spirit. Yet now, with the Victorian London in which he never lived 100 years gone, he lives.
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