Homage To Catalonia - Reviews

Reviews

Contemporary reviews of the book were mixed. Notably positive reviews came from Geoffrey Gorer in Time and Tide, and from Philip Mairet in the New English Weekly. Geoffrey Gorer concluded, 'Politically and as literature it is a work of first-class importance.' Philip Mairet observed, 'It shows us the heart of innocence that lies in revolution; also the miasma of lying that, far more than the cruelty, takes the heart out of it.' Hostile notices came from the Tablet, where a Catholic critic wondered why Orwell had not troubled to get to know Fascist fighters and enquire about their motivations, and from the Times Literary Supplement and The Listener, from obvious Communists, the first misrepresenting what Orwell had said and the latter attacking the POUM but never mentioning the book. John Langdon-Davies wrote in the Communist Party's Daily Worker that "the value of the book is that it gives an honest picture of the sort of mentality that toys with revolutionary romanticism but shies violently at revolutionary discipline. It should be read as a warning." Some Conservative and Catholic opponents of the Spanish Republic felt vindicated by Orwell's attack on the role of the Communists in Spain; The Spectator s review concluded that this "dismal record of intrigue, injustice, incompetence, quarrelling, lying communist propaganda, police spying, illegal imprisonment, filth and disorder", was evidence that the Republic deserved to fall. A mixed review was supplied by V.S. Pritchett who called Orwell naïve about Spain but added that, 'no one excels him in bringing to the eyes, ears and nostrils the nasty ingredients of fevered situations; and I would recommend him warmly to all who are concerned about the realities of personal experience in a muddled cause.' Franz Borkenau, in a letter to Orwell of June 1938, called the book, together with his own Spanish Cockpit, a complete "picture of the revolutionary phase of the Spanish War."

According to Raymond Carr: "The Spanish Civil war produced a spate of bad literature. Homage to Catalonia is one of the few exceptions and the reason is simple. Orwell was determined to set down the truth as he saw it. This was something that many writers of the Left in 1936-39 could not bring themselves to do. Orwell comes back time and time again in his writings on Spain to those political conditions in the late thirties which fostered intellectual dishonesty: the subservience of the intellectuals of the European Left to the Communist 'line', especially in the case of the Popular Front in Spain where, in his view, the party line could not conceivably be supported by an honest man. Only a few strong souls, Victor Serge and Orwell among them, could summon up the courage to fight the whole tone of the literary establishment and the influence of Communists within it. Arthur Koestler quoted to an audience of Communist sympathizers Thomas Mann's phrase, 'In the long run a harmful truth is better than a useful lie'. The non-Communists applauded; the Communists and their sympathizers remained icily silent.... It is precisely the immediacy of Orwell's reaction that gives the early sections of Homage its value for the historian. Kaminski, Borkenau, Koestler came with a fixed framework, the ready-made contacts of journalist intellectuals. Orwell came with his eyes alone."

After years of neglect Homage to Catalonia re-emerged in the 1950s, following on from the success of Orwell's later books. The publication in 1952 of the first US edition (by Harcourt, Brace, of New York) with an influential introduction by Lionel Trilling, " elevated Orwell to the rank of a secular saint". Another twist arrived in the late 1960s when the book "found new readers in an age of student radicalism and guerrilla struggle - Orwell being seen as an early Che Guevara and now appeared to offer a premonition of the Soviet suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring." The book was praised by Noam Chomsky. Its popularity has continued, notably with Ken Loach's heavily Orwell-influenced film Land and Freedom. Republished by Penguin Books in Britain in 1962, it has never been out of print since, and remains far better known than Franz Borkenau's The Spanish Cockpit, a book Orwell himself had called, in July 1937, "the best book yet written on the subject" of the Spanish war.