Orwell: Life and Art

6. "An Affirming Flame": Homage to Catalonia

Six “An Affirming Flame” Homage to Catalonia I sent my first essays on Orwell to the English novelist John Wain, who had written most perceptively about him, and was immensely gratified by Wain’s letters of encouragement and (when we met in Oxford) by his friendship. I later met Georges Kopp’s son and found out much more about Orwell’s military hero. This essay placed Homage, a focal point in his literary career, in its political and literary context. It showed that its genre is war memoir; that its great theme is comradeship ; and that it expressed Orwell’s deep-rooted need to be, as John Donne wrote, “involved in mankind.” It’s highly ironic that his best book sold only six hundred copies in his lifetime and if the bullet that pierced his throat had had a slightly different trajectory, he would never have written Homage or his political satires of the 1940s. It’s worth noting, as Orwell would say, that the only people who still believe in Marxism are North Koreans, Cubans and fraudulent but prosperous English professors. May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair Show an affirming flame. W. H. Auden, “September 1, 1939” In his valuable essay, “Orwell in Perspective,” John Wain states that much of the criticism on Orwell is useless or misdirected because it “started out from the wrong end. It is impossible to criticize an author’s work adequately 6. “an affirming flame” 63 until you have understood what kind of books he was writing.”1 Homage to Catalonia (1938), which contains autobiography, military history, political analysis and propaganda, is problematical in this respect and seems a mixture of “kinds.” The structure of the book is determined by Orwell’s motivations and psychological needs as well as by the pattern of historical events.This essay attempts to place it in perspective in two ways: according to its genre and its relation to Orwell’s other books. I believe its genre is war memoir and its model those classic accounts of the Great War, narrated from the victim’s viewpoint, which Orwell discusses in “Inside the Whale.” Critics have frequently noted that Orwell’s war experience in Spain provided the original impetus for his late political satires. If Homage portrays the revolution, Animal Farm describes the “revolution betrayed” and Nineteen Eighty-Four the “triumph of reaction.” What has not been observed, however, is that Homage is closely related to his early life and personal narratives and that its central theme of comradeship and human solidarity (the main support of the victim in war) is an expression of his intense need to be accepted by and “involved in mankind”—a need that was generated by his experiences in St. Cyprian’s and Eton, in the colonial service, with Parisian plongeurs, London paupers and Wigan miners. Homage portrays not only an eyewitness account of what really happened in Spain, but also the story of a man’s growth in personal and political awareness.The central tension between politics and war, reflection and action, disenchantment and idealism, creates the dominant form of Homage and reflects the poignant opposition of victimization and comradeship. In “Why I Write,” Orwell states that “Homage to Catalonia is, of course, a frankly political book, but in the main it is written with a certain detachment and regard for form. I did try very hard in it to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.”2 Though critics find the political chapters merely ephemeral and obstructive, Orwell’s evaluation is reliable and his creative instinct sound. The form of the book, which he said was “the best I have written,” is finely wrought. The structure of Homage is based on two contrasts. First, the descriptions of combat on the Aragon front are contrasted to Orwell’s three visits to Barcelona in December, April and June. Second, at each visit the revolution has rapidly deteriorated, so that the radically reversed political conditions provide an increasingly dramatic and painfully ironic reflection on his previous stay. Orwell’s two apparently distinct purposes converge and unify as the four dominant events of the book reveal that the military action at the front is negated by the political events in Barcelona. The parapet attack (chapter 7) and Orwell’s wound (chapter 12) climax his two visits to the 64 part i. the...