“To us he was just Eric . . . one of a small band of foreigners, mostly British, fighting on the Aragon Front.” Talking with Charles and a British colleague in the POUM office, Eric Blair decided to abandon his plan to enlist in the International Brigades—the force being recruited by the world’s Communist parties—and instead join the POUM militia, which was manning the front line against Franco’s troops in nearby Aragon.
“Eric,” Charles wrote, “was tall, lean and gangling, to the point of being awkward. . . . He was tongue-tied, stammered and seemed to be afraid of people.” Tongue-tied the newcomer might be in conversation, but he was not so in print, where he wrote under the name of George Orwell.
It is unsurprising that the Orrs were not familiar with his name, for at this point in his life—he was thirty-three—Orwell was little known even in England. He had been supporting himself mostly by working part-time in a bookstore and by running a small grocery shop out of his home. (On his POUM militia enlistment papers, he put down his occupation as “grocer.”) The work that would first bring him wide public notice, The Road to Wigan Pier, a close-up look at poverty in the industrial north of England, he had finished before he left for Spain, but it was not yet published. The book he would write about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia, would eventually become the most widely read memoir of this conflict in any language.
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