Hell and Good Company by Richard Rhodes

Author:Richard Rhodes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

TEN

Cuckoo Idealists

George Orwell, the British novelist and journalist, had spent a miserable winter as a militia volunteer on a freezing mountainside on the Aragon front, in Catalonia. Finally, in late April 1937, his unit was relieved. He headed for Barcelona in rags and worn-out boots, nearly barefoot and crawling with lice. “I wanted a hot bath,” Orwell recalls in Homage to Catalonia, “clean clothes and a night between sheets more passionately than it is possible to want anything when one has been living a normal civilized life.” He arrived in Barcelona on the afternoon of 26 April. His wife, Eileen, had been waiting there for him, but he had hardly settled in when the sporadic battling that came to be called the May Days began between political factions. The uproar that led Picasso in Paris to stop painting Guernica between 3 and 8 May put poor Orwell on a rooftop with a rifle for days, guarding the headquarters of the organization he had been fighting for, the POUM.

Ironically, Orwell had volunteered with the centrist and anti-Stalinist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, almost by accident after his arrival in Spain in December 1936. The British socialist MP Jennie Lee remembered him turning up at the hotel where she was staying in Barcelona, “a tall thin man with a ravaged complexion,” and asking her “could I tell him where to join up. He said he was an author: had got an advance on a book from Gollancz, and had arrived ready to drive a car or do anything else, preferably to fight in the front line.” Lee was suspicious and asked him for credentials. He told her he had none: “He had seen no one, simply paid his own way out.” He allayed her suspicion, she recalls, “by pointing to the boots over his shoulder. He knew he could not get boots big enough for he was over six feet. This was George Orwell and his boots arriving to fight in Spain.” Lee had sent this boot-proud political innocent along to John McNair, the local representative of the International Labor Party, which was affiliated in Spain with the POUM.

“I used to sit on the roof marveling at the folly of it all,” Orwell writes of the May Days. “You could see for miles around—vista after vista of tall slender buildings, glass domes and fantastic curly roofs with brilliant green and copper tiles; over to eastward the glittering pale blue sea—the first glimpse of the sea that I had had since coming to Spain. And the whole huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement.” The streets were empty, the streetcars stopped where their conductors had abandoned them, but the firing was nearly continuous along the Ramblas and echoing from the buildings, “on and on and on, like a tropical rainstorm.”

It wasn’t even clear at first, Orwell says, “who was fighting whom and who was winning.

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