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3 ½ stars.

Now, after many false starts ��

In my first attempt at reviewing this, I began by saying “This is a first rate source for information �� on the Spanish Civil War.�� Wrong!!! It really is a very poor source of information on the SCW. Because it is on a very personal level, and is mostly seen from a very limited and narrow point of view, this is really an almost useless book for learning anything historically significant about the war.

So, let’s start over.

Why is this book so famous?

The first reason should be obvious, its author. Orwell is one of my favorite authors, as he is for a great number of readers.

I believe the second reason is this. For many years Homage was one of the only English language, non-academic books available about the Spanish Civil War (with a famous author, no less). This book has been rated by over 17,000 readers here on GR. Among non-fiction books dealing with the war, I would venture that no others have been rated by even one-tenth that many readers.

What’s in the book.

The book is really two “books��. One “book��, the majority of the words, is about Orwell’s personal experiences in the war. A war memoir. The second “book�� contains Orwell’s analysis of the machinations of the Soviet Government and the Communist Party during the war, specifically regarding the Spanish situation in that period.

There are two different layouts for the book.

The second of the above “books�� was chapters V and XII of Homage to Catalonia as originally published. Orwell had second thoughts about this arrangement, and later suggested that these two chapters be moved to appendices. Some editions of the work have actually done this. Others have kept the original layout. It’s easy enough to tell about the book you read. If it has 14 chapters and no appendices, it’s the original layout; otherwise it will have 12 chapters and the two appendices. (The copy of the book I have is a paperback version of the first U.S. edition, in the original layout. It’s a Harvest Book, published by Harcourt Brace & World, with a copyright date of 1952. It contains an introduction by Lionel Trilling, which has been reprinted in many editions of the book since then.)

The first book - when. The 12 chapters of Orwell’s experiences in Spain take place from late in 1936 to about the middle of 1937. In Volume 1 of The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, titled An Age Like This 1920-1940, entry 92 is a letter dated 15 December 1936, in which he says that he should be leaving for Spain “in about a week��. Entry 99, dated 8 June 1937, is another letter, written while Orwell was still hospitalized in Barcelona. From the last couple chapters of Homage is would appear that it was probably no more than a couple weeks after this letter that, having been discharged from hospital and met up with his wife, they had made it across the border into France. Entry 100, an article called Spilling the Spanish Beans, was written after he was back in England, and appeared in two installments in New English Weekly on 29 July and 2 September.

The first book, as a war memoir. Frankly, it really isn’t very exciting. Of course it’s well written, but Orwell’s experiences on the front on which he was stationed, in Catalonia, southwest of Barcelona, didn’t really see all that much action. There was enough action for Orwell to receive a bullet wound in the neck, which could easily have killed him, and did put him in hospital for much of the remaining time he was in Spain. The chief interest of this majority of the book is mainly of the “this is what being stationed on a pretty inactive front was like in the mid 1930s in Spain�� sort.

We meet few other characters (none of them memorable, for me) in which we can become interested, or who played an important part in Orwell’s own experiences.

The second book. In the second “book�� Orwell goes into details of how he came to be connected to the Catalonian Anarchist formation he ended up with, instead of with a Communist formation. (He had had a letter of Introduction from a Communist organization in England, but it had little effect on how he was assigned by the Republican recruiters who were dealing with foreign volunteers.)

Then he tells us of the various contingents of the Republican forces, and the political leanings that they each had. Now here’s the thing. At least as far as I know, Orwell did not speak Spanish. So, first, whatever information he got was either from the few Spaniards he met that may have spoken English, or else second or third hand from non-Spanish English speakers. Then, since he was connected to an Anarchist unit, naturally much, if not most, of this information came from Anarchist-leaning men.

I don’t remember (and I haven’t the book at hand as I write) if Orwell gives any indication that he was familiar with the decades-old animosity that had existed between Communist, socialist, and at least two different flavors of anarchist political movements in Catalonia.

For these reasons, Orwell’s book is little used as a reference for histories of the Spanish Civil war by academics. He just didn’t have that deep a knowledge of what was going on politically on the Republican side, especially as regards the tides of semi-allied eras these groups had gone through, interspersed with longer and very violent periods of conflict between them.

Now I’m not saying that the things he writes in the book are flat wrong, or are useless. But I don’t think they are a dependable source of information. Of some other books I’ve read on this era of Spanish history, two contain MUCH more, and I’m sure better, information than is found in Orwell’s second “book��. These are (a) The Spanish Civil War A Very Short Introduction, and (b) Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth. The first book, by English historian Helen Graham, is a modern, up-to-date compendium, dense with information, about the causes of the war, the major phases of the military conflict, the political and social forces driving the two sides, and the brutal way in which Franco spent years afterwards making sure that those who had opposed him paid for their crimes; it makes use of much primary material that has become available only with the demise of Franco and the beginnings of a democratic Spain.

The second book is a magnificent summary of Spanish social and political movements for the 60-70 years preceding the SCW, with a brief Afterward written after the war was over. It does not deal directly with the years in which the War was fought.


What is wrong with Orwell’s version. Orwell seems to imply (though I don't know how closely he comes to saying this outright) that the Republican cause was basically betrayed by Stalinist/Communist machinations which produced mass arrests and imprisonments (and worse) of long standing major figures in the socialist and anarchist forces fighting for the Republic.

In her book, Graham writes that this considerably overstates the effect of these very right wing Stalinist activities in Spain (which certainly did happen), and in no way is the reason that the Republican side lost the war.

Far more important were these facts. (1) While Franco's forces were being supplied with weapons, tanks, planes, etc by the fascist governments of both Hitler and Mussolini, the Republican side was dependent on a single source of arms, Russia. (And at some point in the war, Stalin decided to cut his losses in this regard.) (2) The Republicans desperately wanted to be able to buy arms from other sources, but couldn't. Why couldn't they? (3) The attitude of England, whose capitalist power brokers were much more concerned with the prospect of the leftist Republicans winning than they were with the conservative, right wing Franco winning, prevented it. How? (4) England, and to a somewhat lesser extent France, led a diplomatic initiative which formed a very effective arms embargo on all of Spain throughout the war. Of course Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union paid no attention to this embargo, but other "law-abiding" countries were for the most part quite content to observe the embargo.

The Republicans never really had a chance, certainly after the time at which Russia cut off their arms supply - and really not even before that happened.

I would recommend either of the above books, or better yet both of them, as a source of information for (a) the SCW, and (b) the state of Spanish society when the Civil War broke out. This would be a far more useful reading exercise for this knowledge than Homage to Catalonia.