Upon escaping across the French border in June 1937, he stopped at the first post office available to telegram the National Statesman, asking if it would like a first-hand article.
The offer was accepted but the article, “Eyewitness in Barcelona”, was rejected by editor Kingsley Martin on grounds that his writing “could cause trouble” (it was picked up by Controversy). In the months after leaving Spain, Orwell wrote a number of essays on the war, notably “Spilling the Spanish Beans” and a praiseful review of Franz Borkenau’s The Spanish Cockpit.
Writing from his cottage at Wallington, Hertfordshire, he finished around New Year’s Day 1938.
First edition
After Orwell had returned to England in 1937, his pitch for the memoir was quickly turned down by his own publisher Victor Gollancz, who worried that its publication might harm the cause of anti-fascism. Orwell concluded that Gollancz was “part of the Communism-racket” and sought out a different publisher; he was recommended by ILP secretary Fenner Brockway to Frederic Warburg, a publisher associated with the anti-Stalinist left, who agreed to a contract with Orwell.
In September, a deal was signed for an advance of £150 (equivalent to £12,000 in 2023). By January 1938, Orwell had completed the book and, on 25 April 1938, Secker & Warburg published it under the title Homage to Catalonia. Orwell remarked to Jack Common that they hadn’t been able to think of a better title.
The book was initially commercially unsuccessful, selling only 683 copies (out of 1,500) in its first 6 months, with many copies of its initial print run remaining unsold at the time of Orwell’s death in 1950.
Orwell himself had wondered if the book had been boycotted by the British press, while publisher Fredric Warburg himself believed that the book had been “ignored and hectored into failure”. “Ten years ago it was almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Communism; today it is almost impossible to get anything printed in favour of Anarchism or ‘Trotskyism’,” Orwell wrote bitterly in 1938.
Later editions
Following the success of Orwell’s later books, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, it was posthumously recognised as a “lost classic” of the now-famous author. The book received a second wave of sales after the first American edition was published by Harcourt Brace, in 1952, with an introduction from literary critic Lionel Trilling.
In Britain, Secker & Warburg published a new edition of the book in 1951; publication was taken over by Penguin Books in 1962 and it has never fallen out of print since then. The book received a third wave of sales during the late 1960s, buoyed by interest from the period’s counterculture and the New Left. Historian Paul Preston speculated in 2017 that Homage had become the highest selling and most read book about the civil war.
These later editions incorporated revisions requested by Orwell himself, in order to correct some mistakes he had made in the first edition and to rearrange the chapter sequence so the “general information” about political context was moved to an appendices. In 1986, Peter Davison published an edition with a few footnotes based on Orwell’s own footnotes found among his papers after he died.
Translations
The only translation published in Orwell’s lifetime was into Italian, in December 1948. A French translation by Yvonne Davet—with whom Orwell corresponded, commenting on her translation and providing explanatory notes—in 1938–39, was not published until 1955, five years after Orwell’s death.
Orwell’s Homage finally received publication in Spain during the early 1970s, although much its content was suppressed and distorted by the Francoist censors. It received a second Spanish edition in 1978, after the approval of the Spanish Constitution, but it wasn’t until 2007 that an uncensored, comprehensive edition of the book was published in Spain.
Reception
Contemporary reviews (1930s–1940s)
Initial reception of Homage were mixed and few in number, with reviews being divided between supporters and opponents of Orwell’s analysis of the conflict.
Many positive reviews of the book came from Orwell’s friends and political allies, such as Geoffrey Gorer and John McNair respectively. Veterans of World War I, such as Herbert Read and Gerald Brenan, praised the book for its vivid depiction of life on the frontlines of a war.
Read commented that, except for a lack of artillery bombardment, Orwell’s “physical miseries” in Aragon seemed worse than his own in Ypres; while Brenan related to his descriptions of war’s “immense boredom and its immense charm, the sense of being a human being again among other human beings.” Irene Rathbone likewise wrote that he had captured the feelings of the men that fought in the World War, commenting that he was “in essence” a part of that same generation.
Other positive reviews came from staunch anti-communists in Conservative and Catholic circles, who had opposed the Spanish Republic from the outset. A review for the conservative magazine The Spectator concluded that the “dismal record of intrigue, injustice, incompetence, quarrelling,
lying communist propaganda, police spying, illegal imprisonment, filth and disorder” was evidence that the Spanish Republic had deserved to fall. The book also received a positive review from Austrian journalist Franz Borkenau, who wrote that Homage and his own book The Spanish Cockpit formed a complete picture of the Spanish Revolution of 1936.
A mixed review for The Listener described the book as a “muddle-headed and inaccurate” account of the war and criticised it for its positive depiction of the POUM, while also praising Orwell’s vivid description of “the horror and filth, the futility and comedy, and even the beauty of war.”
Another mixed review was supplied by V. S. Pritchett who called Orwell naïve about Spain but added that “no one excels him in bringing to the eyes, ears and nostrils the nasty ingredients of fevered situations; and I would recommend him warmly to all who are concerned about the realities of personal experience in a muddled cause”.
In a negative review for the Communist Party of Great Britain’s newspaper, The Daily Worker, John Langdon-Davies wrote that “the value of the book is that it gives an honest picture of the sort of mentality that toys with revolutionary romanticism but shies violently at revolutionary discipline. It should be read as a warning.”
Anti-fascist poet Nancy Cunard later wrote that the book was riddled with “perfidious inaccuracies” and came away from it thinking Orwell was a Trotskyist, wondering “what kind of damage he has been doing, or trying to do, in Spain”. Other negative reviews were published in The Tablet and The Times Literary Supplement.
British historian Tom Buchanan believed that, at the time of its initial publication, Orwell had “delivered a message that was too unwelcome, and at too late a stage in the war, to stimulate the kind of debate that he may have wished to initiate.”
Most of the British left believed that the Spanish Civil War had been a simple conflict between democracy and fascism, ignoring the role of revolutionaries on the Republican side, which Orwell himself believed had made them complacent regarding the situation.
In late 1937, when Nancy Cunard began soliciting opinions from British authors on which side of the conflict they supported, Orwell responded that he refused to write about “defending democracy”, retorting that the Spanish Republican government had forced fascism onto Spanish workers “under the pretext of resisting Fascism”. Kingsley Martin subsequently refused to publish any of Orwell’s “anti-government propaganda” in the New Statesman, which led Orwell himself to conclude that he was a victim of censorship.
Anti-communist reevaluation (1950s)
The success of Orwell’s novels, and his death in 1950, brought Homage back into the limelight as people began to reassess the effect that his experiences in Spain had on his work. The release of several memoirs by Spanish ex-communists also triggered a reevaluation of the prescience of Orwell’s criticisms of Communism, with Valentín González commenting that his writings had been “confirmed”.
In an obituary on Orwell, British literary critic V. S. Pritchett commented that “Don Quixote saw the poker face of Communism”. In June 1950, the anti-communist writer Stephen Spender praised Homage as “one of the most serious indictments of Communism which has been written”, remarking that the book demonstrated that all ideologies were capable of terrible things, if they aren’t taken together with “a scrupulous regard for the sacredness of the truth of an individual life.”
He commented that: “politically, the liquidation of the POUM was not an event of great importance; humanly speaking, it was a greater failure for the Republic even than the defeat.” Spender even argued that Homage was a better book than Nineteen Eighty-Four, as it depicted “real horrors and real betrayals”.
Upon the publication of the book’s first American edition in 1952, American literary critic Lionel Trilling exalted Orwell as a “secular saint”, who was wholly committed to truth and journalistic objectivity. Historian John Rodden argued that Trilling’s introduction to Homage was instrumental in bringing the book to prominence, as the American intelligentsia of the period had been in search of a “moral and political condemnation” of Spanish communism.
American reviews re-conceived the book as a key piece of context for understanding Orwell’s later work, presenting it
