Dennis Glover – The Last Man In Europe

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Book Review, Books about Books, Dennis Glover, George Orwell, The Last Man In Europe

As clearly, accessibly and authentically written as the subject himself would have insisted on

The title of Dennis Glover’s faction about George Orwell and his writing, was a possible work-in-progress title for Orwell’s last novel, the extraordinarily reverberating Nineteen Eighty Four

Australian author Glover has very clearly penned an absolute labour of love here, which though drawing strongly from Orwell’s writing and from various biographical and historical writings of his times, is crafted as a novel, and in language which tries for the clarity and immediacy of Orwell’s own writing.

Eric Blair the man was someone of great complexity. I confess he was very much a hero of my youth, and not only the novels, but the much cherished 4 volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, published by Penguin still maintain their battered, thumbed presence on my bookshelves

Glover’s book starts really with the writing of Keep The Aspidistra Flying, published in 1936. Central character Gordon Comstock, a shabby, high minded unsuccessful writer, castigates and vilifies the bourgeoisie, and exists on the edges of genteel penury, whilst working in a bookshop and seeking to find a way to bed his girl, Rosemary, when neither of them have the money to find privacy to do so, in a world of sharp eyed landladies living on the premises.

He started walking. Bleakness. Why did he have to be good at bleakness? Obviously, to represent failure, bleakness was inevitable. But how many writers had become successful by depressing everyone? Such writers were usually famous after they were dead….You didn’t buy books in order to feel gloomy, did you? For 10/6 you wanted a little happiness and pleasure…..Bleakness, it occurred to him, meant he would never be able to afford to marry. He picked up a piece of brick and threw it over the embankment at the water, but it landed in the mud

Orwell himself drew heavily on his own experiences with this one, a reflection of the challenges between being a high minded writer and a successful one. Not to say the challenges of getting published in the first place.

Orwell moved with ease – well, the results moved with ease, however hard the writing itself may have been in the crafting – between fiction, whether mined from his own experiences or from the lives of the times, and from his investigations into the reality of what life was like, particularly for those on the margins of society, or at least, deprived from present power which might shape society. His writing on the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, which is also covered here, on the life of the poor, The Road to Wigan pier and Down and Out in Paris and London are also explored.

Glover beautifully delineates Blair the man, Orwell the writer and avoids slipping into hagiography.

I found myself moved and excited by Glover’s fictional imaginings, – how particular ideas, phrases, events might have made their way into his two most bleak and warning fictions – Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four – for example, the horrific rat episode in his last book, juxtaposed with reality on Jura, in a damp, decaying, isolated abandoned farmhouse, where he had retreated to in order to write and edit his last novel. At this time, Orwell was in severely failing health, with tuberculosis. His specialist had forbidden writing, through the exertion any activity was placing on his lungs, and he had also had several excruciating sounding procedures carried out to try and manage the condition, before then being treated with a new medicine, Streptomycin, which was also not without horrific side effects at the dosage required.

He realised with a shudder that the future wasn’t something to look forward to, but something to be frightened of. Yes, it was coming alright

I found this section of Glover’s book almost unbearable and heartbreaking, even though they were leavened by the satisfaction found in the crafting of the writing itself, by the dying man

For the first time, he was no longer certain he would live to see the world rebuilt. And even if it was rebuilt, maybe it would all happen again, people’s memories being so short

I recommend this most warmly to Orwell’s admirer’s – but also, to those for whom the subject himself may not be so well known. It stands on its merits as a very well crafted, thought provoking novel

This was a wonderful choice by my on-line bookclub so well done to the pickers of the titles and to those of us who voted for this one (including me!)

The Last Man In Europe UK
The Last Man In Europe USA

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George Orwell – Homage to Catalonia

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Book Review, George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, The 1938 Club, The Spanish Civil War

“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians”

George Orwell was not only a writer whom I fell in love with in my late teens and early twenties, but was also a man with qualities, as shown in his writing and his life, that seemed to me heroic.

What struck me about Orwell and his writing was always the humanity of the man, and the honesty to test himself and his beliefs. He knew, it seemed, what he was, and was aware of the prejudices which class, sex, and culture impose (on all of us). He was also someone who could examine his beliefs and was not afraid to admit he was wrong

Nowhere does this show itself so clearly as in two of his great autobiographical, journalistic writings, Down and Out In Paris and London, and Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938. This book recounts Orwell’s experiences in the Spanish Civil War. Like many on the left Orwell went to Spain to fight Fascism. Which in Spain took a different form from Germany and Italy. The democratically elected government in Spain was left leaning. An alliance of various right wing groupings (supported by the arms from Germany and Italy) attempted to overthrow that government. Although there were several right wing groups with their own agenda, they were more united against the left than the multiplicity of left wing groupings were in their prime focus against their common enemy, the right.  Primarily, though Russia supported the left, what the Communist Party was supporting was State Capitalism. Some of the other leftist groups, notably the ‘Trotskyist’ Marxist P.O.U.M (the militia Orwell fought alongside when he first went to Spain) and the Anarchists, were fighting for a bottom-up workers’ revolution.

              Partit Obrer d’Unificació Marxista

Initially trying to get papers to go to Spain to fight for the Republic, Orwell did approach Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. (Those Britons intending to fight for the Republic needed supporting documents from a British left organisation. Pollitt however did not consider Orwell ‘sound’. This meant Orwell got his papers from the ILP, the Independent Labour Party. Practically, this meant that he was assigned to a militia which was predominantly P.O.U.M . Had the CP given him papers, he would have entered the war with P.S.U.C , the ‘official’ Communist Party (Stalinist) line. And his experience would have been a vastly different one. An ‘official’ CP line was put out, and widely reported in the Press, that the P.O.U.M were fifth columnists, and were in fact a front for the Fascists. P.O.U.M and the more left wing trades union groupings (F.A.I; C.N.T – Anarchists) were of course nothing of the sort, but were interested in winning a revolution, as well as a war.

Except for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers’ control, but bourgeois democracy. It hardly needs pointing out why ‘liberal’ capitalist opinion took the same line.

The experience of the P.O.U.M. militia, and later, in Barcelona, were for Orwell a transforming experience. The contrast between a top down imposed line, and a bottom up without-hierarchy, though at times frustratingly inefficient, seemed to connect with Orwell’s own desire to seek the truthful, human encounter, rather than the party line.

To be perfectly honest, the complexities of that war, some 80 years ago, still seem difficult to understand, and it is very clear (as Orwell suggests) that information and misinformation was deliberately put out on all sides. Ancient ideological enmities between particular left groupings do seem to get stuck in fighting each other.

Placa De George Orwell Barcelona named in memory of Orwell’s service in the Spanish Civil War

Where I like and trust Orwell is that he wrote this book from his direct experience. A small corner of that war, and from within an organisation which was fairly quickly made illegal. Orwell’s relationship is always with the people he is alongside, not with official lines.

This is at times a remarkably confusing account of warfare. That is not to criticise Orwell – because that is the nature of war, from within the battlezones, minute by minute. Add to that the fact that the Spanish Civil War, and interpretations of what was happening still leads to shouting between different factions and believers on the left, and between different scholarly accounts and interpretations.

Orwell was fighting on a front line, near Huesca, where very little was happening as the lines were quite far apart. Paradoxically, it was when he was in Barcelona for a few days leave, looking forward to getting away from the cold and the rats and the lice, that everything kicked off, and the workers,-united,-will-never-be-defeated, broke down because the various Republican faction’s pressing differences opened out into naked conflict

I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan

Orwell reminds us that we are ALL partisan and have agendas. Perhaps that is something which is refreshing about him – he describes what he sees, he also applies his investigative, journalistic look to the stories that were told by others with more obvious agendas and party lines to promote.

I went back to my post on the roof with a feeling of concentrated disgust and fury. When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like a historical character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always outweigh everything else. Throughout the fighting, I never made the correct ‘analysis’ of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of miles away. What I was chiefly thinking about was not the rights and wrongs of this miserable internecine scrap, but simply the discomfort and boredom of sitting day and night on that intolerable rood, and the hunger which was growing worse and worse – for none of us had had a proper meal since Monday

In a way, it is Orwell’s ‘inability to make the correct analysis’ which seems a deal more honest than black and white analyses

That view which I formed when I read this first, has only been reinforced. And underlined by a very apposite quote, found in a Wiki article about Homage to Catalonia

The Spanish Civil war produced a spate of bad literature. Homage to Catalonia is one of the few exceptions and the reason is simple. Orwell was determined to set down the truth as he saw it. This was something that many writers of the Left in 1936–39 could not bring themselves to do. Orwell comes back time and time again in his writings on Spain to those political conditions in the late thirties which fostered intellectual dishonesty: the subservience of the intellectuals of the European Left to the Communist ‘line’, especially in the case of the Popular Front in Spain where, in his view, the party line could not conceivably be supported by an honest man. Only a few strong souls, Victor Serge and Orwell among them, could summon up the courage to fight the whole tone of the literary establishment and the influence of Communists within it. Arthur Koestler quoted to an audience of Communist sympathizers. Thomas Mann’s phrase, ‘In the long run a harmful truth is better than a useful lie’. The non-Communists applauded; the Communists and their sympathizers remained icily silent … It is precisely the immediacy of Orwell’s reaction that gives the early sections of Homage its value for the historian. Kaminski, Borkenau, Koestler came with a fixed framework, the ready-made contacts of journalist intellectuals. Orwell came with his eyes alone.

Raymond Carr, “Orwell and the Spanish war”, essay in the World of George Orwell, 1971

My battered old version of the book also has a later essay by Orwell, “Looking Back on The Spanish Civil War”, which was published in 1953, and gives a clear analysis of the highly complex threads, the unlikely ideological bedfellows, in both countries and political and ideological groupings,  from a vantage point 15 years later.

There is also a very clear Wiki article, including a timeline of Spanish history where the seeds of the conflict can be traced, specifically on the Spanish Civil War.

                      Pablo Picasso – Guernica, 1937
(Guernica was bombed at the request of the Spanish Nationalists (Falangists) by German and Italian planes)

It illustrates, yet again, how deeply tangled and complex the seeds of our ability to self-destruct are. Sometimes the fact that we are a self-conscious species, and our ability to self-reflect, – and self-deceive, as well as deceive others, seems a dreadful evolutionary aberration.

I was delighted (though churned up and deeply saddened) to be sprung into re-reading this account of ‘this pitiful and muddled war’ by Karen’s 1938 reading challenge She has done a remarkably clear review of Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia Amazon UK
Homage to Catalonia Amazon USA