George Orwell is disillusioned

I'm reading the Peter Davison 20-volume Complete Works of George Orwell and I've arrived at Volume 11, Facing Unpleasant Facts, 1937-1939. Orwell went to Spain in December of 1936 to fight with the International Brigade, but he ended up as part of POUM, Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista, with which he connected through representatives of the Independent Labour Party who were fighting in Spain.

He fought until May when he was shot in the throat and went to Barcelona to recover. He and his wife escaped from Spain just ahead of the Stalinists who had broken into his wife's hotel room and stolen all her papers and his diaries. They then held a secret hearing and convicted the Orwells of being Trotskyists and sentenced them to death.

At first Orwell didn't want to admit that these other people who were fighting the good fight were executing people, with or without a trial. But eventually he faced up to what the totalitarian Stalinists were doing - and what had happened to the Russian Revolution. He accepted finally that the glowing reports from Stalin's world were fanciful and that there was a grim gulag in the workers' paradise.

Orwell may have been no political theoretician, especially in 1937; and he certainly did not have the facts available to him that have now surfaced; but, intuitively, he assessed the position accurately. The vision of a socialist society that he experienced on first arriving in Barcelona was not destroyed by Franco; it was betrayed by his Communist allies. As described by him in Homage to Catalonia, this has all the inevitability of tragedy. That peculiar evil feeling in the air - an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and veiled hatred' that he found on his final visit to Barcelona was precisely that of the miasma of evil and terror dramatised in his favorite Shakespeare play, Macbeth. The effect of that experience marked all else he wrote and did until the day he died.

There is an excellent quote in this volume from a letter written by Jennie Lee, the wife of Aneurin Bevan, the architect of British socialized medicine.

. . . up to his last day George was a man of utter integrity; deeply kind, and ready to sacrifice his last worldly possessions - he never had much - in the cause of democratic socialism. Part of his malaise was that he was not only a socialist but profoundly liberal. He hated regimentation wherever he found it, even in the socialist ranks.

Comments

[ChrisCross53]

An interesting post. People seem to view Orwell as simply being anti-Communist, but he was anti-totalitarian, whatever the regime, and what happened in Spain must have had a huge impact on him. I've been reading his essays, which I always enjoy (he is such a good writer), but I've never liked his novels - I find them too bleak. However, having read your post maybe I will revisit Homage to Catalonia.

[Mary]

You're right, Chris, Orwell's first concern in politics was totalitarianism and he hated the Communists because they were in his opinion just as fascist as the fascists. Which he knew first-hand from his Spanish experiences.

When he got back to England none of the Communist press would print his work and even Golantz refused Homage to Catalonia, before it was even written. Orwell was, in late 1937, which is the period of the letters and essays that I'm reading now, very much concerned about England becoming "fascist" when World War II came. He was solidly anti-war in 1937 and all his life he as also solidly socialist. Fascinating man.