Orwell Loses a War
One realized afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism… One had breathed the air of equality.
-George Orwell on the Spanish Civil War
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, most Americans had understood war to be an unforgivable evil. The war between Russia and Ukraine has a decided villain in most coverage. But, even in these stories, readers can expect a sympathetic observer, not the outright experiences of a warrior.
It’s been a while since the age of the warrior-poet. This is disticntly different from the soldier-writer, like a Hemingway, who commercialized the adventure and adrenaline of war but didn’t necessarily fall for the hype of the cause in the same way, as say, Lord Byron. Lord Byron (1788-1824), a Romantic poet once accused of bullying John Keats to death, was part of the Greek War for Independence (1821-1829). He didn’t come for the coverage. He came to find his purpose and live his philosophy, explaining:
“I came here to join a nation, not a faction.”
During his time in Greece, Byron set aside his previously hedonistic-leaning lifestyle to be a true military leader. In the face of factionalism and military ineptitude, Byron came into his own as a Spartan-like leader, training his troops valiantly and subsidizing the Greek cause despite being a foreigner.
This is an example of a writer suddenly seeking to prove that a life lived is the highest art. In this case, Byron proved the point when he died of fever in 1824 while preparing an artillery attack on a fortress. As British scholar David Brewer explains:
Byron achieved everything he could have wished. His presence in Greece, and in particular his death there, drew to the Greek cause not just the attention of sympathetic nations, but their increasing active participation ... Byron is primarily remembered with admiration as a poet of genius, with something approaching veneration as a symbol of high ideals, and with great affection as a man: for his courage and his ironic slant on life, for his generosity to the grandest of causes and to the humblest of individuals, for the constant interplay of judgment and sympathy. In Greece, he is still revered as no other foreigner, and as very few Greeks are, and like a Homeric hero he is accorded an honorific standard epithet, megalos kai kalos, a great and good man.
Have there been other poets who have decided to become mercenary? Writers who decided to write from the trenches with the pen of life?
George Orwell came close when he covered the Spanish Civil War.
The Catalan Contingency
The Spanish Civil War, which lasted from 1936 to 1939, pitted the Republicans, a charcuterie board’s of leftwing groups willing to die for change, against the Nationalists, a rightwing coalition willing to die for structure and strong men. It’s a unique bookmark in history that arguably led to the preservation of Spain in World War II through the potent pacifism of dictator Francisco Franco, who ruled for 36 years after the triumph of the Nationalists and, apparently, was so irritating a man or so shrewd a politician that Hitler once said he would rather have his teeth pulled than deal with him again.
Orwell, a committed socialist, arrived in Spain in 1936 and served as an eccentric advocate for the Republican cause. A striking figure with a tailored outfit and a height of six foot two, he towered over the average Spanish soldier and was said to have dressed for wartime like a “prep school master,” according to some sources. But he went to the front lines and served in the cause like any other soldier.
One can read Orwell’s experience in the Spanish Civil War and see a man discovering a new capacity to connect to people (a problem for his decidedly programmatic mind). Even in seeing the fractures in the Republicans, he couldn’t help but feel a divine wonder at the spirit of a people all fighting for a cause beyond themselves. He spent more than 100 days on the front line and the experience would become Homage to Catalonia (1938).
His friends didn’t think much of Orwell’s search for inspiration. Henry James, eating with Orwell in Paris before his departure, told him the idea was stupid and his theories "about combating Fascism, defending democracy, etc., etc., were all baloney.”
So what, for Orwell, was war good for?
It gave him a new capacity to believe and to understand humanity. As he explained later:
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
The Commonality Clause
Orwell summed up his purpose in the Spanish Civil War succinctly: he didn’t join the war to fight fascism, but to fight for “common decency.”
That common decency he sought, like Byron, meant a new form of nationalism that seemed hopeful, open, and equal. In his pursuits, Orwell hoped to discover a new way of living at a time when the industrial revolution had rendered great numbers of people more miserable and polluted than ever.
As Rebecca Solnit, author of Orwell’s Flowers (2021) explains about the late 1930s:
There was a broad and deep belief in the first two thirds of the twentieth century that everyone and everything could be reinvented, that the old ways could be swept away, the past forgotten, the future controlled, human nature reshaped.
Hope, to Orwell, seemed like it was just another optimization away. He wanted to understand the math of the Republican cause and the calculation that could lead to a better society. His conviction in that calculation created a certain fearlessness. As Solnit writes:
He passed days and weeks in squalor and stagnation, got lice, helped seize a fascist machine-gun nest without a machine gun and still wanted to watch flowers.
Even on the battlefield, he found beauty, writing:
“On a bullet-chipped tree in front of our parapet thick clusters of cherries were forming… wild horses with pink blooms the size of saucers struggled over the shell-holes round Torre Fabian. Behind the line you could meet peasants earing wild roses over their ears.”
Perhaps George Orwell was the last Romantic standing. But, in the era before Animal Farm and 1984, Orwell also discovered the dark hunger of humanity without rulers when the Communist press accused him of being an undercover fascist.
As he wrote:
No one who was in Barcelona then, or for months later, will forget the horrible atmosphere produced by fear, suspicion, hatred, censored newspapers, crammed jails, enormous food queues and prowling gangs of armed men.
His height didn’t do him any favors. Standing in a trench above his fellow comrades, Orwell was shot in the throat by a sniper. Soon after, his favored party, the Workers’ Party of Marxism Unification, would be accused of fascism by pro-Soviet communists. As members of the party were arrested and assassinated, Orwell and his wife fled to France.
Aware of the intoxicating effects of a cause, Orwell saw, earlier than most, the cannibalism that devours communities for want of consecrated conviction. It is in this appetite where the strong men win wars. This became the vision of totalitarianism that would inform the rest of his work: Orwell wanted to show that, no matter how good a cause could feel, every beautiful moment was paid, somewhere, by ugliness.
Or, as Solnit concludes in her book:
The contemporary world is full of things that look beautiful and are produced through hideous means.
People Changing People
It was Orwell’s Flowers that made me think about the philosophy that gave Orwell’s works such a unique perspective. At Litverse, we’ve covered why his prose could be objective due to a charming snobbery, why his programmer’s brain made him effective if cold and removed, and how he could, through sheer willpower, overcome his aristocratic tendences to still create meaningful art.
The truth is that George Orwell is a man who forced himself to wrestle and reset his own mentality to escape an empire he knew was wrong, but, for all his life, held an imperial attitude over any belief that seemed to defy the facts he believed to be true. This made him skeptical of anything where one truth became an immobile center to a cause, ideology, or government. If “Orwellian” means anything, it means oppression by overreach that squeezes dissent into silence by virtue of becoming a foundation opposed to objectivity. But any reader, after reflecting on Orwell’s own life, may be left wondering what “Orwellian objectivity” might mean, too.
Orwell’s Roses leaves readers with the thought that we first must be reminded that every cause has a different center and in stepping away from our own center to observe another, we wander in the spaces between and discover a new world. Or, at least, a beauty we may have otherwise never have seen in a life we otherwise never would have lived.
Gorgeous writing here, and your conclusion really rings true in this day and age, as we approach an election year when, more than ever, we need to muster the courage to step away from our own centers to observe another and try to wander in the spaces between so we can build understanding and community somehow despite the deep divide.
I like how you brought these three pieces home: interesting to consider the cause-and-effect of how his Syrian experience imprinted formative programming and institutional cynicism, and led him to the impulse to affirm his democratic socialist values through a wartime commitment in Spain. Through your account of his life, with Solnit as a sturdy guide, there is a clear story told. I loved "1984" as a sixteen-year-old, and appreciated "Animal Farm"'s cleverness (despite its didacticism), so these pieces provided interesting context on how Orwell became Orwell.
Overall, a well-drawn portrait of a man shaped by complex and contradictory life events. We get the sense of both how callous his brand of utilitarianism could be towards those he disdained; we also get the sense of a man whose heart pumped red blood for the causes he lived by. Triple-plus good 🫡🤝
Just finished "The Power and the Glory" by Graham Greene: he's another author who has a lot to say on the psychology behind power structures, especially the Catholic Church's. 10/10 recommend, as I would his novels "The Quiet American" or "The Heart of the Matter".