George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia (1938)
"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."
