On the 72 anniversary of George Orwell's death it seems appropriate to share some of his thoughts on truth, history and writing.
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I started out with good intentions to offer a few thoughts on Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
In typical ass backwards fashion I had seen the movie Hemingway and Gellhorn (2012) earlier this summer. That prompted me to read the first-rate Hotel Florida by Amanda Vaill.
I didn’t particularly like this man Hemingway portrayed in the book and the film. I also realized I didn’t know much about the Spanish Civil War so decided to read For Whom the Bell Tolls.I’ve read Old Man and the Sea. Years ago A Moveable Feast was required in some course or other way back when.
And now a song, Hemingway, by the late writer/singer Paul Quarrington resonates in my head.
“I like my fiction with a chaser of beer
Real short worlds and a vision that is clear
Hemingway is the one I read
Real straight shooter gives me what I need
Hemingway always gets it right
With a simple syntax and a prose that’s tight.
But short worlds and clear vision are not what I found.
You’re probably familiar with the story. Considered one of the century’s great works of fiction, For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the tale of Robert Jordan, employed in America as a college instructor of Spanish who now fights as a demolition expert with the Loyalists. Jordan’s assignment is to blow up a bridge. He leads several Spanish guerillas in the undertaking.
The narrative unfolds slowly and largely leaves aside big picture issues of fascism, democracy, freedom and communism. Robert Jordan is a committed man who nevertheless questions to what exactly he is committed. For example, Jordan recognizes those he must kill as living individuals just like himself. In the end Jordan accepts the importance of man as an individual and as an integral part of humankind.
For Whom the Bell Tolls was a tremendous commercial success. Nearly half a million copies (491,000) were sold in six months following its October 1940 publication.
Hemingway was known to stretch the truth but in For Whom the Bell Tolls, it has been said that this aspiration of the writing of “a true book which in its invention is truer than any other thing that ever happened” may have been realized.
By and large most critics agreed. Not all though.
Spanish author Arturo Barea wrote that Hemingway was a spectator who wanted to be an actor.
“Yet it is not enough to look on; to write truthfully you must live, and you must feel what you are living,” avowed Barea from the perspective of a Spaniard who had no choice but to live with the realities of war.
Hemingway gained his understanding of the Spanish War while filing stories for the North American newspaper Alliance. For this he was well paid - $1,000 per story. At the same time he was occupied with making a film on the war – the Spanish Earth.
On filming days, he and his entourage would rush out from their base at Madrid’s marble facaded Hotel Florida to find a good elevated spot to view the fighting.
“I had on figured out from studying the terrain, with this probability in mind, some days before. When we reached it, sweating heavily and beginning to be most thirsty again, the view was marvelous. The battle was spread out before us.”
It is argued that much of what Hemingway wrote on Spain during this period was propaganda. Certainly his film was.
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| Madrid during the War |
So what about truth?
George Orwell had something to say on the matter.
The English writer argued that history had, in fact, stopped in Spain in 1936. Orwell put this idea forward in Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War, four years after General Francisco Franco seized power from the democratically elected government of the Second Spanish Republic.
On July 18th of that year, elements of the Spanish Army led by Franco and far right supporters including the Catholic Church attempted to overthrow the government. They failed on that day. But it was only the beginning. Fascist Germany and Italy joined in to support Franco and by 1939 the dictator was ensconced in power.
Orwell, already skeptical of media, had seen that reporting in Spain’s newspapers “did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie.” Orwell, then a virtually unheard of English writer known as Eric Blair, worried that the “concept of objective truth (was) fading out of the world and lies would pass into history.”
There was “news” of great battles “where there had been no fighting and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed.” Back in London at the time newspapers were selling such lies “and eager intellectuals (were) building emotional superstructures over events that had never happened.”
If the established media was not telling the truth could truth be found in the stories of independent journalists and writers?
Like Hemingway’s fictional character Robert Jordan, Eric Blair was on the front lines.
Blair had gone to Spain in 1936 to report on the conflict but actually ended up fighting on the side of the Loyalists. Initially he was uninterested in the political situation but when at the front he found himself:
“in the middle of a political discussion that practically never ended. In the draughty evil-smelling barn of the farm-house where we were billeted, in the stuffy blackness of dug-outs. Behind the parapet in the freezing midnight hours, the conflicting ‘party lines’ were debated over and over.”
Blair had some sympathy for the enemy as “(m)any of the troops opposite…were not Fascists at all, merely wretched conscripts who had been doing their military service at the time when war broke out and were only too anxious to escape.”
“How will the history of the Spanish war be written.”
Orwell answered his own question in his later works Animal Farm and 1984. In 1984 protagonist Winston Smith, an editor in the Records Department at the Ministry of Truth, makes a surprising discovery.
“Who controls the past controls the future:
Who controls the present controls the past.”
In the case of Spain that “who” was the Franco government which remained in power until 1975. However, the various factions aligned against Franco, particularly Stalin’s Soviet Union, promoted their own version of the truth.
Restarting History
Like the passenger pigeon it seems that truth has vanished forever from our political discourse.
Not that long ago when Trump was President of the United States and still tweeting he posted a tweet where, in one sentence, he made 4 false claims. A tweet is about two short sentences.
This came as no surprise to those paying attention to the state of today’s politics.
In Ontario the Premier, of his self-styled Government for The people makes promises like:
No one will lose their job, absolutely no one.
I’ll lower hydro rates by 12 per cent.
We won’t touch the Greenbelt. of Ontario
It is not enough that the promises are unfulfilled but that such statements are repeated so often that they become assumed authentic.
So, if history stopped in 1936, can it be restarted?
In various jurisdictions around the world people have embarked on memory projects. Spain is one example. Here, where the history of their Civil War has been suppressed years after Franco was gone, graduate students have been recording audiovisual testimonies of militants, witnesses, and victims of the Spanish Civil War and Francoist repression.
Perhaps history can be launched again.
