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.[38]
Many positive reviews of the book came from Orwell's friends and political allies, such as Geoffrey Gorer and John McNair respectively.[51] 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 sharm, 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.[43] 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.[51] 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.[51]
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."[51] 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".[52]
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."[51] 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".[53] Hostile notices also came from The Tablet, where a critic wondered why Orwell had not troubled to get to know Fascist fighters and enquire about their motivations, and from The Times Literary Supplement and The Listener, "the first misrepresenting what Orwell had said and the latter attacking the POUM, but never mentioning the book".[54]
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."[55] 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.[53] 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".[53] 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.[56]
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.[39] 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".[39] In an obituary on Orwell, British literary critic V. S. Pritchett commented that "Don Quixote saw the poker face of Communism".[39] 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."[39] 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."[39] Spender even argued that Homage was a better book than Nineteen Eighty-Four, as it depicted "real horrors and real betrayals".[57]
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.[42] American reviews re-conceived the book as a key piece of context for understanding Orwell's later work, presenting it as about "the making of an anti-totalitarian".[42] Some understood it as a demonstration of communist tactics for seizing power, placing it within the post-WWII context of the formation of the Eastern Bloc and the People's Republic of China.[42] American journalist Herbert Matthews was sharply critical of the book's re-contextualisation by Americans during the Cold War, arguing that its importance as an account of the Spanish Civil War had been eclipsed by its status as an anti-communist exposé.[58]
Socialist reevaluation and communist backlash (1960s–1970s)
Another reevaluation of Homage came during the 1960s, as the emerging counterculture and the New Left brought a new generation of readers to pick up the book. The anti-communist tendencies of the 1950s, which had buried Orwell's positive depiction of revolutionary socialism, were partly reversed and Orwell was again reconceived as a predecessor of Che Guevara. In 1971, the Welsh socialist scholar Raymond Williams commented that Homage had been reevaluated, in the context of the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and the Protests of 1968, as taking a position in favour of revolutionary socialism and opposed to both capitalism and Marxism-Leninism.[59] This position was exemplified in Noam Chomsky's book American Power and the New Mandarins, in which the author used Homage to directly compare the Spanish revolution with Vietnamese resistance to US intervention, arguing that neither complied with the "liberal dogma" of the American intelligentsia. He speculated that the book's status as a symbol of 1950s anti-communism would have been "of little comfort to the author".[59] Raymond Carr praised Orwell in 1971 for being "determined to set down the truth as he saw it."[60] In his 1971 memoir, Herbert Matthews of The New York Times declared, "The book did more to blacken the Loyalist cause than any work written by enemies of the Second Republic."[61]
The revival in the book's popularity also triggered indignation from figures in the CPGB, which had never forgiven Orwell for it.[62] In 1967, the historian Frank Jellinek expressed regret that the book had been exploited by anti-communists such as James Burnham and that it had brought the suppression of the POUM, which he called a "fairly minor piece of wartime expediency", to a prominent place within historiography of the civil war.[63] In the late 1970s, British communist veterans of the war, such as Thomas Murray and Frank Graham, denounced the book respectively as a "weapon" of the anti-Stalinist left and as a slander against the International Brigades.[62] In 1984, CPGB politician and former commander of the International Brigades, Bill Alexander, accused Orwell of lacking anti-fascist sentiments and called the book an "establishment" denigration of the "real issues" of anti-fascism.[62] That same year, Lawrence and Wishart published Inside the Myth, a collection of essays from authors hostile to Orwell, which John Newsinger described as "an obvious attempt to do as much damage to his reputation as possible".[19] To British historian Tom Buchanan, the sustained Communist campaign against Homage had been "so wrongheaded and ill-informed that it has probably, if anything, bolstered Orwell's reputation." He concluded that the legacy of the book, which cemented the repression of the POUM in popular historiography and damaged the reputation of the Communist Party, revealed the potential that single books can have to leave their mark history.[63]
Nevertheless, the revolutionary conception of Homage continued through the subsequent decades, with British film-maker Ken Loach notably adapting the book into his 1995 film Land and Freedom. Tom Buchanan comments that the film may not have been received as well if previous generations hadn't been primed to view the Spanish Civil War through the lens of "the Revolution betrayed".[64] Buchanan was critical of the far-left's adoption of the book, pointing out that Orwell had never fully agreed with the POUM's politics and that his view of revolutionary Spain "ignit[ing] the passions of workers around the world" had been naïve, given the prevalence of dictatorship at the time.[64] He also commented that Orwell's revolutionary politics had been "unconvincing" and only a brief phase of his political development, which evolved and changed following his publication of Homage, as evidenced by his more moderate reflection in his 1942 essay "Looking Back on the Spanish War".[64]
Historiographical evaluation (1970s–present)
When histories of the civil war first started to be published, historians generally disregarded Homage as a primary source. In his 1962 book The Spanish Civil War, English historian Hugh Thomas wrote that, while he thought Homage was a well-written memoir that was "perceptive about war", he also considered it to be misleading about the events of the war.[58] He thought that Orwell had misjudged the war by believing that revolutionary idealism alone was capable of achieving victory; Thomas himself believed that the only way that the Republic could have won the war was through a process of centralisation and militarisation, backed by the Soviet Union.[65] Tom Buchanan himself disputed Thomas' assessment that Homage was "misleading" on the war, so long as it wasn't considered a description of the conflict as a whole.[65] Paul Preston likewise cautioned against taking the book as an "overview of the civil war, which it is not".[65] In contrast, Homage has also contributed to a historiographical trend that centred the internal conflict within the Republican faction, exemplified by the work of Burnett Bolloten.[66]
A revival of interest in the Spanish Civil War was later ignited by the Spanish transition to democracy in the 1970s, as a new generation of historians began studying the conflict and Orwell's own account of it, which received increasing amounts of scrutiny over his interpretation of the events.[67] Gabriel Jackson wrote that Orwell had understood the civil war only as an analogue to the situation in Europe and lacked an understanding of the local political context in Spain.[68] Michael Seidman argued that Orwell's depiction of the "working-class paradise" in Barcelona was questionable, as he had only been accounting for the convinced militants and not the "indifference" of many individual workers.[68] Helen Graham pointed out how the internecine conflicts witnessed by Orwell had predated the civil war and Soviet intervention in the conflict, arguing against the "Cold War parable of an alien Stalinism which 'injected' conflict into Spanish Republican politics", although her analysis of the consequences of the May Days ultimately aligned with Orwell's.[68]
In his own analysis of the book's affect on historiography, Tom Buchanan found that research on the conflict had not entirely disqualified Homage, but had instead emphasised it as a "snapshot of a complex political situation" taken by an outsider.[68] Although Orwell himself warned readers to be aware of his own biases, mistakes and distortions, even engaging in self-deprecation over his own lack of knowledge of Spanish history and culture, Buchanan worried that people whose only insight into the conflict was Orwell's book would "receive a very unbalanced picture of the conflict as a whole."[57] Buchanan concluded that the "very real danger" presented by the book was that it had been recontextualised, from an individual's personal account, into a book that was seen as representative of the civil war as a whole.[69]
