Another World, Another Time, at the Library

by Bill Peak

When I have really loved a book, lost myself in it night after night before sleep, reading the last sentence can leave me feeling bereft.

Adam Hochschild’s Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 was such a book. It is, perhaps, strange to miss a book about war, but it wasn’t the war so much as the innocence of the men and women who offered up their lives to fight Fascism in that war, their idealism, their sense of purpose, that I missed. And I missed the place itself as well, the cold, dry, rugged landscapes of northern Spain. It was a long-ago time in a different country that struggled with problems like, and entirely unlike, our own.

And so, with misgivings, I went online and asked the Talbot County Free Library to reserve for me copies of the two works Hochschild recommended for further reading: George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and Ernest Hemingway’s short story Under the Ridge. This despite the fact I swore off Hemingway in my youth and—while I learned a great deal from Orwell’s 1984 and Burmese Days—neither was what I would call fun reading.

I think it was a combination of the man’s many failures as a human being and the fact that, in my teens, I had unconsciously mimicked his writing that convinced me to turn my back on Papa Hemingway. Like a lover spurned, I had stalked off in a huff, telling myself the man wasn’t worthy of my admiration, that he was little more than a braggart, a writer who resorted to stories of blood and violence to pump himself up in his own eyes and those of his public.

So it was that, reading the first pages of Under the Ridge, I was shocked to discover (remember?) that the man I had dismissed half a century ago as an overweening fraud was, in fact, a genius. My god the man could write!

And then there was Orwell. I read 1984 in the 1960s when that title still evoked a certain futuristic frisson. Now, all these years later, all I really remembered of the book was the phrase “Big Brother is watching”—and that I had found it wholly depressing. I read Burmese Days more recently and, while it did an excellent job of portraying the evils of colonialism, the image it created of that institution left me feeling equally dispirited.

So I embarked upon Orwell’s work as reluctantly as I had Hemingway’s and, once again, was in for a surprise. If 1984 and Burmese Days paint gloomy pictures of humanity’s strivings, Homage to Catalonia provides their perfect counterpoint. It is a hopeful book, a book full of real-life human beings who still believe in the perfectibility of humankind and are willing to fight and, if necessary, die for that belief. You can’t help but warm to such people.

But aside from contradicting my expectations, Hemingway’s and Orwell’s accounts of the Spanish Civil War could not be more different. Reading the former’s short story with its detached, impersonal prose was like listening to an account of the war as narrated by Death. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, on the other hand, is related by a narrator I could easily believe in and identify with, Orwell himself, a living breathing human being who, in combat, often found himself as frightened and confused as I’m sure I would have been. Indeed, Orwell’s descriptions of the night attacks he participated in reminded me, in their tragicomic nature, of my father’s tales of Okinawa: men groping in the dark through an alien landscape, bewildered, terrified, with little idea of where they were going or what they were supposed to do when they got there.

And how the man could write! I wish I could copy out the first chapter of Homage to Catalonia for you here, so you could see for yourself why I think it easily one of the best opening chapters of a book I have ever read. Captivating and immediate, that’s the way I would describe it, but even words like these don’t do it justice. Check Homage to Catalonia out for yourself, read its first chapter, and I guarantee you will not be able to put the thing down.

According to its dust jacket, The New Yorker called Orwell’s memoir “perhaps the best book that exists on the Spanish Civil War.” I’m not sure it’s not the best book on war period.

Finally, what makes Homage to Catalonia so real, so human, is the author’s almost touching faith in the revolutionary ideals of the Republic—ideals that have required him to place his life in the balance. When, eventually, inevitably, internecine fighting breaks out in Barcelona between the various Republican factions, you can feel Orwell straining to convince himself the street battles might actually matter, that they aren’t just a pointless folly.

He takes these things so seriously, goes to great lengths to explain the political tensions between organizations that don’t even exist anymore—the C.N.T. vs. the U.G.T., the Communists vs. the Trotskyites, the P.O.U.M. vs. the P.S.U.C. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so little guilt about skipping passages in a book as I did these. It seems a world whose concerns have utterly vanished. Which makes Orwell’s sincere anxiety about them all the more poignant and, somehow, endearing.

And of course there is always the creeping suspicion that, perhaps, they have not utterly vanished. When Yeats wrote in The Second Coming of the politics of his time: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity….” he could just as easily have been writing about our world today. Except, thankfully, our world still has libraries in it, places where anyone can pluck a book like Homage to Catalonia off the shelf and, reading it, find inspiration for the still radical idea of a life devoted not to self but to others.