Sometimes the information I need is right under my nose all along and I am too stubborn to see it. Case in point: George Orwell. A mentor of mine has been telling me for about two years now to read Homage to Catalonia because of the novel I am writing that takes place in Madrid at the very end of the Spanish Civil War, and me being me, I kept saying yes and not reading it, because the Spanish Civil War is basically over when my novel starts and anyway it takes place in Madrid not Barcelona (the setting of Orwell's memoir of his time at the front with the Spanish Republican militias) and also I always have a ton of books I want to read and not enough time to read them. All this to say, Orwell was on the back burner.
(And when I first attempted to buy the book on Amazon.com I selected the first edition that showed up in the search results and unwittingly ended up with a pirated copy with the worst typeset and abysmal quality. Just heartbreaking to see Orwell's work misused by a cesspool of fraudsters. But I got a refund from Amazon.com and ended up with the legitimate edition at last.)
So I had Homage to Catalonia but no inclination to read it except the nagging thought I should listen to my mentor. (Now might be a good time to mention that I read 1984 in high school but didn't care for it. Those were different times, the Soviet Union was collapsing and the world Orwell described seemed irrelevant to the world I lived in. Ah, the naivety of youth.) But I also had a new house and no inclination to get out of the house to exercise, a problem I solved by getting myself a walking treadmill. Now I can watch movies and documentaries while walking (with ankle weights). I only needed something good to watch and past experience has shown that the "courses" in The Great Courses are a good fit for me and that kind of endeavor (you want something interesting but not too interesting so that you won't forget to walk!). In fact I learned Spanish using The Great Courses (more on that in another blog post). So I got George Orwell: A Sage for all Seasons. And I loved it.
Professor Michael Shelden from Indiana State is a talented lecturer and an expert on Orwell with in-depth expertise including many first-hand accounts from acquaintances of Orwell's. In fact, his 1991 biography of Orwell was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and his interest in his subject really shines through. The life of George Orwell (born Eric Blair) was gripping from the start. His father lived on the other side of the world for years because he worked in the Opium department of the Indian Civil Service. Blair attended boarding school at St Cyprian's from 1911 to 1916 and hated the experience, which provided the basis for his essay Such, such were the joys. He then attended Eton, where he seems to have neglected his academic studies. He then joined the Imperial Police and was posted in Burma. He resigned in March 1928, after 5 1/2 years of service, to become a writer. This became the basis for the novel Burmese Days (1934) and the essays A Hanging (1931) and Shooting an Elephant (1936). He lived in London and Paris before returning home. He dated a clergyman's daughter and wrote a book of the same name. He met his future wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy in London in 1935.
His book The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) investigated the social conditions in economically depressed northern England. (Until Animal Farm and 1984, it is safe to say that Orwell was a far superior essayist than novelist.) Shelden also provides great anecdotes about how Orwell's books found publishers and makes those times come to life. He married Eileen in June 1936 and set out for Spain in December 1936. I won't spend this post detailing Orwell's life (suffice it to say he died in January 1950 of tuberculosis, having remarried after Eileen's death in March 1945, and his second wife appeared to show little love for him but enjoyed playing the role of Orwell's widow for decades afterwards).
But the point of this post is for me to write about Homage to Catalonia. I thought it'd be a boring read, because I didn't really want to read about war, especially since the Fascists won and ushered Spain into a dictatorship that lasted about 35 years. Yet from the very first pages I found the book gripping. There is an immediacy to Orwell's writing that makes the reader feel she is in Barcelona or at the front with him. Orwell proves to be an astute observer with a sharp eye for the internecine conflict putting Anarchists against Communists and he deciphers the public propaganda like no other. We are treated to a glimpse into the backstage conflicts that led to the Republican defeat. Orwell punctures a number of myths in the process. What a blessing to have a writer of his talent share a first-hand account and decipher the conflict for us. Homage to Catalonia is definitely one of the best nonfiction books of the century.
Further reading: an essay by Masha Gessen in The New Yorker.
