There’s a Substack to be written on the books people are ashamed not to have read, those reproachful Gaps that make us feel guilty and reluctant to admit the offence to others. As a 17 year old I was passionate about Orwell, his non-fiction and essays and later Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. I even wandered through the four volumes of his collected journalism and letters. When I gave essay writing classes at London University some years ago I often urged on students his essay “Politics and the English Language” even if I realised that it was more a guide to plain honest prose than the more creative possibilities of language. “Good prose is like a window pane,” [i.e so clear that it does its job of letting us see its meaning without obstruction] is a great idea for writers of non-fiction but perhaps poets and writers of fiction need to be a little more complex, playful, indirect, ornate. It’s essentially a puritan aesthetic and creative writers will inevitably want to kick against it.
But all this is an artful dodge to disguise the shameful truth that it was only this week that I got round to reading Homage to Catalonia (1938). I don’t know why it took me so long but in a sense these gaps are harmless enough. What matters is what one has read not what one has not read. And I enjoyed it though I wonder if it has quite the same impact now as it must have had in the 1930s when it was highly topical and appeared only months after the events it describes. It was part of Orwell’s effort to have the truth told about the Spanish Civil War and the most interesting parts (apart from the vivid battlefront reporting) are his exposure of the lies and manipulations of the various parties and also the British media like the Daily Mail which has still not changed its stripes.
Orwell’s dissection of the various factions under their initials like P.O.U.M. or P.U.S.C. is diligent, and his admission that he could be wrong and that people should recognise that every account is biased to some degree, is attractive. But even he twice suggests that readers not passionate about the factional analysis should considering skipping those chapters where the sectarian nuances of difference are picked over. The Spanish Civil War has been much written about and Orwell’s book is probably regarded now by historians as a passing curiosity, displaced by harder forms of documentary evidence and analysis. And there is also the question explored by Anna Funder in her recent book Wifedom (which I am about to read) of the obscuring of the role played by Eileen O’Shaughnessy, Orwell’s wife who was with him in Spain but whose role is, I gather, culpably underplayed by Orwell.
So, notwithstanding Orwell’s highly readable prose and his vivid accounts of the reality of life at the front line I was less overwhelmed than I had hoped to be by this book. But it was worth it just for the closing sentences which are vintage Orwell. Returning to home counties England from Spain he sees it in all its comforting complacency:
“Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, 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.”
Note: the cover illustration of my 1962 Penguin that I show here is by Paul Hogarth.
Thanks for this Nicholas. I agree the last few pages are the best bit. They blur into/remind me of Coming Up For Air, which is a much better book, I think. Most of his best writing on Spain is in the essays, but he was always needing to sell books...
For what it's worth, I edit a serial of Orwell's journalism (mostly the wartime Tribune columns) here on Substack. There's a lot on poetry, which may surprise some people.
www.orwell.substack.com.
For many years I considered this Orwell’s greatest book. But somehow I had never read Animal Farm. During the pandemic I picked up a cheap used copy and it blew the top of my head off. Not only was it not what I thought it was, but it expressed such an empathetic view of those animals and what/who they represented.
Molly the mare leaving Animal Farm after being told that there would be no lumps of sugar or pretty ribbons after the Rebellion is as good an example of what Thomas Jefferson referred to as the “pursuit of happiness” as I can think of.