Dystopia might win, but it did not have to, and it might not last. In this sense, the courage and bearing of the Catalans taught Orwell to argue against his own direst premonitions.

He was prescient even in the smaller things, writing in 1943 that it was mistaken to believe, as many did, ‘that Franco will fight for the Axis if the Allies invade Europe. Fidelity is not the strong point of the minor dictators.’ To combat Franco in 1937 was to hope for a reverse of European fascism tout court: once that struggle had been betrayed by Stalin and Chamberlain and Daladier, matters resumed the banal shape of realpolitik and local compromise. Excess of zeal is a poor guide, especially for the ideologically inclined.

Just such an excess of wartime enthusiasm, and of the Puritanism that may accompany it, led Orwell to commit his only lapse into demagogy. In May 1937 – that cruellest of months for the cause, as it was to turn out – W. H. Auden published his extraordinary poem ‘Spain’, which first appeared as a shilling pamphlet with proceeds donated to Medical Aid for the Spanish Republic. In a long and extremely moving evolution of verses, the poet attempted to express his emotion for the martyred country itself (‘that arid square, nipped off from hot Africa and soldered so crudely to inventive Europe’), to hymn its centrality in the hearts of thinking and feeling people (‘Our thoughts have bodies/ The menacing shapes of our fever/ Are precise and alive’) and to register the moral agony that was experienced by intellectuals who abandoned neutrality and decided to support the use of force by their chosen side:

To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death;

The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;

To-day the expending of powers

On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

In successive articles, one of them written for The Adelphi in 1938 and another more celebrated under the title Inside the Whale, Orwell emptied the vials of contempt over this stanza in particular. He denounced it as

a sort of thumb-nail sketch of a day in the life of a ‘good party man’. In the morning a couple of political murders, a ten-minutes’ interlude to stifle ‘bourgeois’ remorse, and then a hurried luncheon and a busy afternoon and evening chalking walls and distributing leaflets. All very edifying. But notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder… The Hitlers and the Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’, or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled.

The laden sarcasm here is more than slightly thuggish; it also reflects one of Orwell’s less agreeable habits of mind, which was an instinctive prejudice against homosexuals. (Allusions to ‘pansy’ or ‘nancy’ poets elsewhere in his writing are common enough – there’s one on page 249. They are usually directed at Auden or his supposed clique, and are the only expletives uttered by Orwell that could also have been authored by Zhdanov or some other Stalinist cultural enforcer.)

Auden of course exemplified nothing of the kind; in order to believe that he was, you would have to find the words (not the phrases) ‘liquidation’ or ‘elimination’ to be ‘soothing’. His ‘brand of amoralism’ consisted in trying to be direct and honest about the consequences of going to Spain and overcoming what were essentially pacifist scruples. For example, though he broadcast propaganda for the Republican government from Valencia, he was revolted by the burning of churches – revolutionary actions which Orwell always reports and refers to with the utmost breeziness, as to be expected in time of class warfare and civil strife.

It isn’t clear how much immediate effect Orwell’s polemic had on Auden, but in 1939 he revised ‘Spain’ to delete all allusion to such choices, and after the 1950s he would not permit the poem to be anthologized at all. This is in more than one way a pity, because it robs us of a magnificent minor epic in verse, and leaves stranded and isolated a haunting phrase which many people have heard but which fewer and fewer people can ‘place’. That phrase – ‘History to the Defeated’ – forms part of the climax of the poem, and suggests in an elegiac way that the losers will never be granted their meed of honour. To them, history ‘May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.’ In later life, Auden came, wrongly in my humble opinion, to think of this as an expression of the repulsive idea that impersonal or Hegelian capital-H ‘History’ was necessarily on the side of the triumphant big battalions.

Yet ‘History to the Defeated’ is the underlying subject and text of this collection of pages and fragments. Like several others in the ‘midnight of the century’, the glacial period that reached its nadir in the Hitler–Stalin Pact, Orwell wrote gloomily but defiantly for the bottom drawer. He belongs in the lonely 1930s tradition of Victor Serge and Boris Souvarine and David Rousset – speaking truth to power but without a real audience or a living jury. It is almost tragic that, picking through the rubble of that epoch, one cannot admire him and Auden simultaneously. ‘All I have is a voice’, wrote Auden in ‘September 1, 1939’, ‘To undo the folded lie, / The romantic lie in the brain… And the lie of Authority.’ All Orwell had was a voice, and to him, too, the blatant lies of authority were one thing, while the ‘folded’ lies that clever people tell themselves were another. The tacit or overt collusion between the two was the ultimate foe.

In Catalonia three years ago, the history of the defeated was finally celebrated as a victory. A square near the Barcelona waterfront was named Plaça George Orwell, while a street in the town of Can Rull was named Calle Andrés Nin. Present at the dedications were many veterans of the Barcelona ‘May Days’ of 1937, who had survived to bear witness because Nin never betrayed any names to his interrogators and murderers. The translations of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoi that are read by Catalan schoolchildren are Nin’s translations; he was a figure in Catalonia’s literary and linguistic revival, and a lover of Russia for the same reason that he was a hater of Stalin.