GEORGE ORWELL AND THE POLITICS OF TRUTH

Portraitof the Intellectual as a Man of Virtue

LIONEL TRILLING

G'EORGE ORWELL'S Homage to also a demonstration on the part of its author Catalonia is one of the important of one of the right ways of confronting that documents of our time. It is a very life. Its importance is therefore of the present modest book-it seems to say the least that moment and for years to come. can be said on a subject of great magnitude. A politics which is presumed to be avail- But in saying the least it says the most. Its able to everyone is a relatively new thing in manifest subject is a period of the Spanish the world. We do not yet know very much Civil War, in which, for some months, until about it. Nor have most of us been especially he was almost mortally wounded, its author eager to learn. In a politics presumed to be fought as a soldier in the trenches. Everyone available to everyone, ideas and ideals play knows that the Spanish war was a decisive a great part. And those of us who set store event of our epoch, everyone said so when by ideas and ideals have never been quite it was being fought, and everyone was able to learn that just because they do have right. But the Spanish war lies a decade and power nowadays, there is a direct connection a half behind us, and nowadays our sense of between their power and another kind of history is being destroyed by the nature of power, the old, unabashed, cynical power of our history-our memory is short and it grows force. We are always being surprised by this. shorter under the rapidity of the assault of Communism's record of the use of unregen- events. What once occupied all our minds erate force was perfectly clear years ago, but and filled the musty meeting halls with the many of us found it impossible to admit this awareness of heroism and destiny has now because Communism spoke boldly to our become chiefly a matter for the historical love of ideas and ideals. We tried as hard as scholar. George Orwell's book would make we could to believe that politics might be an only a limited claim upon our attention if idyl, only to discover that what we took to it were nothing more than a record of per- be a political pastoral was really a grim mili- sonal experiences in the Spanish war. But tary campaign or a murderous betrayal of it is much more than this. It is a testimony political allies-or that what we insisted on to the nature of modem political life. It is calling agrarianism was in actuality a new imperialism. And in the personal life what Fw writers in the English-speaking world have was undertaken by many good people as a written more penetratingly than LIONEL TRILL- moral commitment of the most disinterested ING on the problems of culture, art, and morality kind turned out to be an engagement to an in our time. It is of the problem of virtue-how ultimate immorality. The evidence of this a man may be good in an age of intellectual is to be found in a whole literary genre with double-dealing and failure of conscience-that he writes here, taking as his point of departure which we have become familiar in the last the life and work of "a man of virtue": George decade, the personal confession of involve- Orwell. This essay was written as an introduc- ment and then of disillusionment with Com- tion to a new edition of Orwell's Homage to munism. Catalonia, to be brought out next month by Orwell's book, in one of its most signifi- Harcourt, Brace. Mr. Trilling's books include cant aspects, is about disillusionment with Matthew Arnold (939), E. M. Forster (x943), The Middle of the Journey, a novel Communism, but it is not a confession. I (1947), and The Liberal Imagination (950). say this because it is one of the important 218 GEORGE ORWELL AND THE POLITICS OF TRUTH 219 positive things to say about Homage to Cata- and indeed at the very moment that I was lonia, but my saying it does not imply that I reaching for the telephone to tell the pub- share the a priori antagonistic feelings of lisher that I would write it, a young man, many people toward those books which, on a graduate student of mine, came in to see the basis of experience, expose and denounce me, the purpose of his visit being to ask the Communist party. About such books what I thought about his doing an essay on people of liberal inclination often make un- George Orwell. My answer, naturally, was easy and rather vindictive jokes. The jokes ready, and when I had given it and we had seem to me unfair and in bad taste. There been amused and pleased by the coincidence, is nothing shameful in the nature of these he settled down for some chat about our books. There is a good chance that the com- common subject. But I asked him not to mitment to Communism was made in the talk about Orwell. I didn't want to dissipate first place for generous reasons, and it is cer- in talk what ideas I had, and also I didn't tain that the revulsion was brought by more want my ideas crossed with his, which were than sufficient causes. And clearly there is sure to be very good. So for a while we nothing wrong in wishing to record the pain- merely exchanged bibliographical informa- ful experience and to draw conclusions from tion, asking each other which of Orwell's it. Nevertheless, human nature being what books we had read and which we owned. it is-and in the uneasy readers of such But then, as if he could not resist making at books as well as in the unhappy writers of least one remark about Orwell himself, he them-it is a fact that public confession does said suddenly in a very simple and matter-of- often appear in an unfortunate light, that fact way, "He was a virtuous man." And we its moral tone is less simple and true than sat there, agreeing at length about this state- we might wish it to be. But the moral tone ment, finding pleasure in talking about it. of Orwell's book is uniquely simple and It was an odd statement for a young man true. Orwell's ascertaining of certain politi- to make nowadays, and I suppose that what cal facts was not the occasion for a change of we found so interesting about it was just heart, or for a crisis of the soul. What he this oddity-its point was in its being an learned from his experiences in Spain of old-fashioned thing to say. It was archaic in course pained him very much, and it led its bold commitment of sentiment, and it him to change his course of conduct. But used an archaic word in an archaic simplic- it did not destroy him, it did not, as people ity. Our pleasure was not merely literary, say, cut the ground from under him. It did not just a response to the remark's being not shatter his faith in what he had previous- so appropriate to Orwell, in whom there was ly believed, nor weaken his political impulse, indeed a quality of an earlier day. We were nor even change its direction. It produced glad to be able to say it about anybody. not a moment of guilt or self-recrimination. One doesn't have the opportunity very often. Perhaps this should not seem so very Not that there are not many men who are remarkable. Yet who can doubt that it good, but there are few men who, in ad- constitutes in our time a genuine moral tri- dition to being good, have the simplicity and umph? It suggests that Orwell was an un- sturdiness and activity which allow us to say usual kind of man, that he had a temper of it about them, for somehow to say that a mind and heart which is now rare, although man "is good," or even to speak of a man we still respond to it when we see it. About who "is virtuous," is not the same thing as this person and the temper of his mind and saying, "He is a virtuous man." By some heart a word ought to be said. quirk of the spirit of the language, the form of that sentence brings out the primitive T HAPPENED by a curious chance that on meaning of the word virtuous, which is not the day I agreed to write the introduction merely moral goodness, but fortitude and to the new edition of Homage to Catalonia, strength. 220 COMMENTARY Orwell, by reason of the quality that per- of the world. In different ways this was true mits us to say of him that he was a virtuous of Yeats, and of Shaw, and even of Wells. man, is a figure in our lives. He was not a It is true of T. S. Eliot, for all that he has genius, and this is one of the remarkable spoken against the claims of personality in things about him. His not being a genius is literature. Even E. M. Forster, who makes an element of the quality that makes him so much of privacy, acts out in public the what I am calling a figure. role of the private man, becoming for us the It has been some time since we in Amer- very spirit of the private life. He is not ica have had literary figures-men who live merely a writer, he is a figure. their visions as well as write them, who are what they write, whom we think of as stand- ORWELL takes his place with these men as ing for something as men because of what a figure. In one degree or another they they have written in their books. They pre- are geniuses, and he is not-if we ask what side, as it were, over certain ideas and atti- it is he stands for, what he is the figure of, tudes. Mark Twain was in this sense a figure the answer is: the virtue of not being a for us, and so was William James. So too genius, of fronting the world with nothing were Thoreau, and Whitman, and Henry more than one's simple, direct, undeceived Adams, and Henry James, although posthu- intelligence, and a respect for the powers one mously and rather uncertainly. But when in does have, and the work one undertakes to our more recent literature the writer is any- do. We admire geniuses, we love them, but thing but anonymous, he is likely to be am- they discourage us. They are great concentra- biguous and unsatisfactory as a figure, like tions of intellect and emotion, we feel that Sherwood Anderson, or Mencken, or Wolfe, they have soaked up all the available power, or Dreiser. There is something about the monopolizing it and leaving none for us. We American character that does not take to the feel that if we cannot be as they, we can be idea of the figure as the English character nothing. Beside them we are so plain, so does. In this regard, the English are closer to hopelessly threadbare. How they glitter, and the French than to us. Whatever the legend with what an imperious way they seem to to the contrary, the English character is more deal with circumstances, even when they are strongly marked than ours, less reserved, less wrong. Lacking their patents of nobility, we ironic, more open in its expression of wilful- might as well quit. This is what democracy ness and eccentricity and cantankerousness. has done to us, alas-told us that genius is Its manners are cruder and bolder. It is a de- available to anyone, that the grace of ulti- monstrative character-it shows itself, even mate prestige may be had by anyone, that shows off. Santayana, when he visited Eng- we may all be princes and potentates, or land, quite gave up the common notion that saints and visionaries and holy martyrs of Dickens's characters are caricatures. One can the heart and mind. And then when it turns still meet an English snob so thunderingly out that we are no such thing, it permits us shameless in his worship of the aristocracy, to think that we aren't much of anything at so explicit and demonstrative in his adora- all. In contrast with this cozening trick of tion, that a careful, modest, ironic American democracy, how pleasant seems the old, re- snob would be quite bewildered by him. And actionary Anglican phrase that used to drive in modem English literature there have been people of democratic leanings quite wild many writers whose lives were demonstrations with rage-"My station and its duties." of the principles which shaped their writing. Orwell would very likely have loathed They lead us to be aware of the moral per- that phrase, but in a way he exemplifies its sonalities that stand behind the work. The meaning. And it is a great relief, a fine sight, two Lawrences, different as they were, were to see him doing this. His novels are good, alike in this, that they assumed the roles of quite good, some better than others, some of their belief and acted them out on the stage them surprising us by being so very much GEORGE ORWELL AND THE POLITICS OF TRUTH 221 better than their modest genre leads us to at all by the good fairies, or that he had no suppose they can be, all of them worth read- daimon. The good fairies gave him very fine ing; but they are clearly not the work of a free gifts indeed. And he had a strong great or even of a "born" novelist. In my daimon, but it was of an old-fashioned kind opinion, his satire on Stalinism, Animal and it constrained him to the paradox-for Farm, was overrated-I think people were such it is in our time-of taking seriously the carried away by someone's reviving system- Gods of the Copybook Maxims and putting atic satire for serious political purposes. His his gifts at their service. Orwell responded critical essays are almost always very fine, to truths of more than one kind, to the bitter, but sometimes they do not meet the demands erudite truths of the modern time as well as of their subject, as, for example, the essay to the older and simpler truths. He would on Dickens. And even when they are at have quite understood what Karl Jaspers their best, they seem to have become what means when he recommends the "decision to they are chiefly by reason of the very plain- renounce the absolute claims of the Euro- ness of Orwell's mind, his simple ability to pean humanistic spirit, to think of it as a look at things in a downright, undeceived stage of development rather than the living way. He seems to be serving not some dash- content of faith." But he was not interested ing daimon but the plain, solid Gods of the in this development. What concerned him Copybook Maxims. He is not a genius-what was survival, which he connected with tae a relief! What an encouragement. For he old simple ideas that are often not ideas at communicates to us the sense that what he all but beliefs, preferences, and prejudices. has done any one of us could do. In the modern world these had for him the Or could do if we but made up our mind charm and audacity of newly discovered to do it, if we but surrendered a little of the truths. Involved as so many of us are, at least cant that comforts us, if for a few weeks we in our literary lives, in a bitter metaphysics paid no attention to the little group with of human nature, it shocks and dismays us which we habitually exchange opinions, if when Orwell speaks in praise of such things we took our chance of being wrong or inade- as responsibility, order in the personal life, quate, if we looked at things simply and fair play, physical courage-even of snobbery directly, having only in mind our intention and hypocrisy because they help to shore up of finding out what they really are, not the the crumbling ramparts of the moral life. prestige of our great intellectual act of look- ing at them. He liberates us. He tells us that T Is hard to find personalities in the con- we can understand our political and social temporary world who are analogous to life merely by looking around us, he frees Orwell. We have to look for men who have us from the need for the inside dope. He considerable intellectual power but who are implies that our job is not to be intellectual, not happy in the institutionalized life of in- certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion tellectuality; who have a feeling for an older or that, but merely to be intelligent accord- and simpler time, and a guiding awareness ing to our lights-he restores the old sense of the ordinary life of the people, yet with- of the democracy of the mind, releasing us out any touch of the sentimental malice of from the belief that the mind can work only populism; and a strong feeling for the com- in a technical, professional way and that it monplace; and a direct, unabashed sense of must work competitively. He has the effect the nation, even a conscious love of it. of making us believe that we may become This brings P6guy to mind, and also Chester- full members of the society of thinking men. ton, and I think that Orwell does have an That is why he is a figure for us. affinity with these men-he was probably In speaking thus of Orwell, I do not mean unaware of it-which tells us something to imply that his birth was attended only by about him. But Pguy has been dead nearly the Gods of the Copybook Maxims and not forty years, and Chesterton (it is a pity) is 222 COMMENTARY at the moment rather dim for us, even for which leads them to handle their political Catholics. And of course Orwell's affinity and literary opinions in much the same way. with these men is limited by their Catholi- Hazlitt remained a Jacobin all his life, but cism, for although Orwell admired some of his unshakable opinions never kept him the effects and attitudes of religion, he seems from giving credit when it was deserved by to have had no religious tendency in his a writer of the opposite persuasion, and not nature, or none that went beyond what used merely out of chivalry but out of respect for to be called natural piety. the truth. He was the kind of passionate In some ways he seems more the contem- democrat who could question whether de- porary of William Cobbett and William mocracy could possibly produce great poetry, Hazlitt than of any man of our own century. and his essays on, say, Scott and Coleridge Orwell's radicalism, like Cobbett's, refers to prepare us for Orwell on Yeats and Kipling. the past and to the soil. This is not uncom- mon nowadays in the social theory of literary THE old-fashionedness of Orwell's tempera- men, but in Orwell's attitude there is none 1ment can be partly explained by the na- of the implied aspiration to aristocracy which ture of his relation to his class. This was by so often marks literary agrarian theory; his no means simple. He came from that part of feeling for the land and the past simply the middle class whose sense of its status is served to give his radicalism a conservative disproportionate to its income, his father hav- -a conserving-cast, which is in itself attrac- ing been a subordinate officer in the Civil tive, and to protect his politics from the rav- Service of India, where Orwell was born. ages of ideology. Like Cobbett, he does not (The family name was Blair, and Orwell dream of a new kind of man, he is content was christened Eric Hugh; he changed his with the old kind, and what moves him is name, for rather complicated reasons, when the desire that this old kind of man should he began to write.) As a scholarship boy he have freedom, food, and proper work. He attended the expensive preparatory school had the passion for the literal actuality of of which Cyril Connolly has given an ac- life as it is really lived which makes Cob- count in Enemies of Promise. Orwell appears bett's Rural Rides a classic, although a for- there as the school "rebel" and "intellectual." gotten one; his own The Road to Wigan He was later to write of the absolute misery Pier and Down and Out in Paris and Lon- of the poor boy at a snobbish school. He don are in its direct line. And it is not the went to Eton on a scholarship, and from least interesting detail in the similarity of Eton to Burma, where he served in the the two men that both had a love affair with Police. He has spoken with singular honesty the English language. Cobbett, the self-edu- of the ambiguousness of his attitude in the cated agricultural laborer and sergeant ma- imperialist situation. He disliked authority jor, was said by one of his enemies to handle and the manner of its use, and he sympa- the language better than anyone of his time, thized with the natives; yet at the same time and he wrote a first-rate handbook of gram- he saw the need for authority and he used it, mar and rhetoric; Orwell was obsessed by and he was often exasperated by the natives. the deterioration of the English language in When he returned to England on leave after the hands of the journalists and pundits, and five years of service, he could not bring him- nothing in his Nineteen Eighty-Four is more self to go back to Burma. It was at this time memorable than his creation of Newspeak. that, half voluntarily, he sank to the lower Orwell's affinity with Hazlitt is, I suspect, depths of poverty. This adventure in ex- of a more intimate temperamental kind, al- treme privation was partly forced upon him, though I cannot go beyond the suspicion, for but partly it was undertaken to expiate the I know much less about Orwell as a person social guilt which, he felt, he had incurred than about Hazlitt. But there is an unques- in Burma. The experience seems to have tionable similarity in their intellectual temper done what was required of it. A year as a GEORGE ORWELL AND THE POLITICS OF TRUTH 223 casual worker and vagrant had the effect of aging poet from the depths of splenetic discharging Orwell's guilt, leaving him with negation to the acknowledgment of the hap- an attitude toward the working class that piness of fatherhood, thence to an awareness was entirely affectionate and perfectly with- of the pleasures of marriage, and of an exist- out sentimentality. ence which, while it does not gratify his ideal conception of himself, is nevertheless Is experience of being declassed, and the his own. There is a dim, elegiac echo of 11 effect which it had, go far toward de- Defoe and of the early days of the middle- fining the intellectual quality of Orwell and class ascendancy as Orwell's sad young man the particular work he was to do. In the 30's learns to cherish the small personal gear of the middle-class intellectuals made it a moral life, his own bed and chairs and saucepans- fashion to avow their guilt toward the lower his own aspidistra, the ugly, stubborn, or- classes and to repudiate their own class tra- ganic emblem of survival. dition. So far as this was nothing more than We may say that it was on his affirmation a moral fashion, it was a moral anomaly. of the middle-class virtues that Orwell based And although no one can read history with- his criticism of the liberal intelligentsia. The out being made aware of what were the characteristic error of the middle-class intel- grounds of this attitude, yet the personal lectual of modern times is his tendency to claim to a historical guilt yields but an am- abstractness and absoluteness, his reluctance biguous principle of personal behavior, a still to connect idea with fact, especially with per- more ambiguous basis of thought. Orwell sonal fact. I cannot recall that Orwell ever broke with much of what the English upper related his criticism to the implications of middle class was and admired. But his clear, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, but he might uncanting mind saw that, although the have done so, for the prototypical act of the morality of history might come to harsh con- modern intellectual is his abstracting him- clusions about the middle class and although self from the life of the family. We have the practicality of history might say that its yet to understand the thaumaturgical way day was over, there yet remained the con- in which we conceive of intellectuality. 'At siderable residue of its genuine virtues. The least at the beginning of our intellectual love of personal privacy, of order, of man- careers we are like nothing so much as those ners, the ideal of fairness and responsibility young members of Indian tribes who have -these are very simple virtues indeed and had a vision or a dream which confers power they scarcely constitute perfection either of in exchange for the withdrawal from the the personal or the social life. Yet they still ordinary life of the tribe. Or we are like might serve to judge the present and to con- the errant youngest son who is kind to trol the future. some creature on his travels and receives in Orwell could even admire the virtues of reward a magical object. By intellectuality the lower middle class, which an intelli- we are freed from the thralldom to the gentsia always finds it easiest to despise. His familial commonplace, from the materiality remarkable novel, Keep the Aspidistra Fly- and concreteness by which it exists, the hard- ing, is a summa of all the criticisms of a ness of the cash and the hardness of getting commercial civilization that have ever been it, the inelegance and intractability of family made, and it is a detailed demonstration of things. It gives us power over intangibles, the bitter and virtually hopeless plight of such as Beauty and Justice, and it permits the lower-middle-class man. Yet it insists us to escape the cosmic ridicule which in our that to live even in this plight is not without youth we suppose is inevitably directed at its stubborn joy. P6guy spoke of "fathers of those who take seriously the small concerns families, those heroes of modern life"-Or- of this world, which we know to be inade- well's novel celebrates this biological-social quate and doomed by the very fact that it is heroism by leading its mediocre, middle- so absurdly conditioned-by things, habits, 224 COMMENTARY local and temporary customs, and the foolish came about that he should be praising sports- errors and solemn absurdities of the men of manship and gentlemanliness and dutiful- the past. ness and physical courage. He seems to have The gist of Orwell's criticism of the liberal thought, and very likely he was right, that intelligentsia was that they refused to under- they might come in handy as revolutionary stand the conditioned nature of life. He virtues-he remarks of Rubashov, the central never quite puts it in this way but this is character of Koestler's novel Darkness at what he means. He himself knew what war Noon, that he was firmer in loyalty to the and revolution were really like, what gov- revolution than certain of his comrades be- ernment and administration were really like. cause he had, and they had not, a bourgeois From first-hand experience he knew what past. Certainly the virtues he praised were Communism was. He could truly imagine those of survival, and they had fallen into what Nazism was. At a time when most disrepute in a disordered world. intellectuals still thought of politics as a Sometimes in his quarrel with the intelli- nightmare abstraction, pointing to the fear- gentsia, Orwell seems to sound like a leader- fulness of the nightmare as evidence of their writer for the Times in a routine wartime at- sense of reality, Orwell was using the imagi- tack on the highbrows: nation of a man whose hands and eyes and whole body were part of his thinking ap- ... The general weakening of imperialism, paratus. Shaw had insisted upon remaining and to some extent of the whole British morale, sublimely unaware of the Russian actuality; that took place during the nineteen thirties, Wells had pooh-poohed the threat of Hitler was partly the work of the left-wing intelli- gentsia, itself a kind of growth and had written off as anachronisms the that sprouted from the stagnation of the Empire. very forces that were at the moment shaping the world-racial pride, leader-worship, re- The mentality of the English left-wing intel- ligious belief, patriotism, love of war. These ligentsia can be studied in half a dozen weekly men had trained the political intelligence of and monthly papers. The immediately striking the intelligentsia, who now, in their love of thing about all these papers is their generally negative querulous attitude, their complete abstractions, in their wish to repudiate the lack at all times of any constructive suggestion. anachronisms of their own emotions, could There is little in them except the irresponsible not conceive of directing upon Russia any- carping of people who have never been and thing like the same stringency of criticism never expect to be in a position of power. they used upon their own nation. Orwell had the simple courage to point out that the During the past twenty years the negative faineant outlook which has been fashionable pacifists preached their doctrine under con- among the English left-wingers, the sniggering dition of the protection of the British navy, of the intellectuals at patriotism and physical and that, against Germany and Russia, courage, the persistent effort to chip away at Gandhi's passive resistance would have been English morale and spread a hedonistic, what- of no avail. do-I-get-out-of-it attitude to life, has done noth- ing but harm. HE NEv-ER abated his anger against the established order. But a paradox of his- But he was not a leader-writer for the Times. tory had made the old British order one of He had fought in Spain and nearly died the still beneficent things in the world, and there, and on Spanish affairs his position it licensed the possibility of a social hope that had been the truly revolutionary one. The was being frustrated and betrayed almost passages I have quoted are from his pam- everywhere else. And so Orwell clung with phlet, The Lion and the Unicorn, a persua- a kind of wry, grim pride to the old ways of sive statement of the case for socialism in the last class that had ruled the old order. Britain. He must sometimes have wondered how it Toward the end of his life Orwell dis- GEORGE ORWELL AND THE POLITICS OF TRUTH 225 covered another reason for his admiration of his comrades and their leaders. During the the old middle-class virtues and his criticism days of inter-party strife, the POUM was of the intelligentsia. Walter Bagehot used represented in Spain and abroad as being a to speak of the political advantages of stupid- Trotskyist party. In point of fact it was not, ity, meaning by the word a concern for one's although it did join with the small Trotsky- own private material interests as a political ist party to oppose certain of the policies of motive which was preferable to an intellec- the dominant Communist party. Orwell's tual, theoretical interest. Orwell, it may be own preference, at the time of his enlist- said, came to respect the old bourgeois vir- ment, was for the Communist party line, and tues because they were stupid-that is, be- because of this he looked forward to an cause they resisted the power of abstract eventual transfer to a Communist unit. ideas. And he came to love things, material It was natural, I think, for Orwell to have possessions, for the same reason. He did not been a partisan of the Communist program in the least become what is called "anti- for the war. It recommended itself to most intellectual," but he began to fear that the people on inspection by its apparent simple commitment to abstract ideas could be far common sense. It proposed to fight the war more maleficent than the commitment to the without any reference to any particular polit- gross materiality of property had ever been. ical idea beyond a defense of democracy The very stupidity of things has something from a fascist enemy. Then, when the war human about it, something meliorative, was won, the political and social problems something even liberating. Together with would be solved, but until the war should the stupidity of the old unthinking virtues be won, any dissension over these problems it stands against the ultimate and absolute could only weaken the united front against power which the unconditioned idea can Franco. develop. The essential point of Nineteen Eventually Orwell came to understand Eighty-Four is just this, the danger of the that this was not the practical policy he had ultimate and absolute power which mind at first thought it to be. His reasons need can develop when it frees itself from condi- not be reiterated here-he gives them with tions, from the bondage of things and his- characteristic cogency and modesty in the tory. course of his book, and under the gloomy But this, as I say, is a late aspect of Or- but probably correct awareness that, the con- well's criticism of intellectuality. Through dition of Spain being what it is, even the the greater part of his literary career his best policies must issue in some form of criticism was simpler and less extreme. It dictatorship. In sum, he believed that the was as simple as this: that intellectuals did war was revolutionary or nothing, and that not think and that they did not really love the people of Spain would not fight and die the truth. for a democracy which was admittedly a bourgeois democracy. N 1937 Orwell went to Spain to observe But Orwell's disaffection from the Com- the civil war and to write about it. He munist party was not the result of a differ- stayed to take part in it, joining the militia ence of opinion over whether the revolution as a private. At that time each of the parties should be instituted during the war or after still had its own militia units, although these it. It was the result of his discovery that the were in process of being absorbed into the Communist party's real intention was to pre- People's Army. Because his letters of intro- vent the revolution from ever being instituted duction were from people of a certain politi- at all-"The thing for which the Com- cal group in England, the ILP, which had munists were working was not to postpone connections with the POUM, Orwell joined the Spanish revolution till a more suitable a unit of that party in Barcelona. He was time, but to make sure it never happened."' not at the time sympathetic to the views of The movement of events, led by the Corn- 226 COMMENTARY munists, who had the prestige and the sup- Anarchists, together with the "Trotskyist" plies of Russia, was always to the right, and POUM-so it was said-had been secreting all protest was quieted by the threat that the great stores of arms with a view to an upris- war would be lost if the ranks were broken, ing that would force upon the goverhment which in effect meant that Russian supplies their premature desire for collectivization. would be withheld if the Communist lead And on the third of May their plans were was not followed. Meanwhile the war was realized when they came out into the streets being lost because the government more and and captured the Telephone Exchange, thus more distrusted the non-Communist militia breaking the united front in an extreme units, particularly those of the Anarchists. manner and endangering the progress of the "I have described," Orwell writes, "how we war. But Orwell in Barcelona saw nothing were armed, or not armed, on the Aragon like this. He was under the orders of the front. There is very little doubt that arms POUM, but he was not committed to its were deliberately withheld lest too many of line, and certainly not to the Anarchist line, them should get into the hands of the An- and he was sufficiently sympathetic to the archists, who would afterwards use them for Communists to wish to join one of their a revolutionary purpose; consequently, the units. What he saw he saw as objectively big Aragon offensive which would have made as a man might ever see anything. And what Franco draw back from Bilbao and possibly he records is now, I believe, accepted as the from Madrid, never happened." essential truth by everyone whose judgment At the end of April, after three months on is worth regarding. There were no great the Aragon front, Orwell was sent to Bar- stores of arms cached by the Anarchists and celona on furlough. He observed the change the POUM-there was an actual shortage of in morale that had taken place since the days arms in their ranks. But the Communist- of his enlistment-Barcelona was no longer controlled government had been building up the revolutionary city it had been. The the strength of the Civil Guard, a gendar- heroic days were over. The militia, which merie which was called "non-political" and had done such heroic service at the begin- from which workers were excluded. That ning of the war, was now being denigrated there had indeed been mounting tension be- in favor of the People's Army, and its mem- tween the government and the dissident bers were being snubbed as seeming rather forces is beyond question, but the actual queer in their revolutionary ardor, not to say fighting had been touched off by acts of dangerous. The tone of the black market provocation committed by the government and of privilege had replaced the old ideal- itself-shows of military strength, the call to istic puritanism of even three months earlier. all private persons to give up arms, attacks Orwell observed this but drew no conclu- on Anarchist centers, and, as a climax, the sions from it. He wanted to go to the front attempt to take over the Telephone Ex- at Madrid, and in order to do so he would change, which since the beginning of the have to be transferred to the International war had been run by the Anarchists. Column, which was under the control of the It would have been very difficult to learn Communists. He had no objection to serving anything of this in New York or London. in a Communist command and, indeed, had Those periodicals which guided the thought resolved to make the transfer. But he was of left-liberal intellectuals knew nothing of tired and in poor health and he waited to it, and had no wish to learn. As for the conclude the matter until another week of aftermath of the unhappy uprising, they ap- his leave should be up. While he delayed, peared to have no knowledge of that at all. the fighting broke out in Barcelona. When Barcelona was again quiet-some six thousand Assault Guards were imported to TN NEW YoRK and in London the intelli- quell the disturbance-Orwell returned to his Igentsia knew what had happened. The old front. There he was severely wounded, GEORGE ORWELL AND THE POLITICS OF TRUTH 227 shot through the neck; the bullet just missed were entirely good; if only politics were not the windpipe. After his grim hospitaliza- a matter of power-then we should be happy tion, of which he writes so lightly, he was to put our minds to politics, then we should invalided to Barcelona. He returned to find consent to think! the city in process of being purged. The POUM and the Anarchists had been sup- IUT Orwell had never believed that the pressed; the power of the workers had been political life could be an intellectual broken and the police hunt was on. The jails idyl. He immediately put his mind to the were already full and daily becoming fuller- politics he had experienced. He told the the mostdevoted fighters for Spanish freedom, truth, and told it in an exemplary way, men who had given up everything for the quietly, simply, with due warning to the cause, were being imprisoned under the most reader that it was only one man's truth. He dreadful conditions, often held incommuni- used no political jargon, and he made no cado, often never to be heard of again. Or- recriminations. He made no effort to show well himself was suspect and in danger that his heart was in the right place, or the because he had belonged to a POUM regi- left place. He was not interested in where ment, and he stayed in hiding until, with his heart might be thought to be, since he the help of the British consul, he was able knew where it was. He was interested only to escape to France. But if one searches the in telling the truth. Not very much atten- liberal periodicals, which have made the tion was paid to his truth-Homage to Cata- cause of civil liberties their own, one can lonia sold poorly in England, it had to be find no mention of this terror. They were remaindered, it was not published in Amer- committed not to the fact but to the ab- ica, and the people to whom it should have straction. said most responded to it not at all. And to the abstraction they remained com- Its particular truth refers to events now far mitted for a long time to come. Many are in the past, as in these days we reckon our still committed to it, or nostalgically wish past. It does not matter the less for that-this they could be. If only life were not so tan- particular truth implies a general truth gible, so concrete, so made up of facts that which, we now cannot fail to understand, are at variance with each other; if only the will matter for a long time to come. And things that people said were good were really what matters most of all is our sense of the good; if only the things that are pretty good man who tells the truth.