A bit of a pilgrimage
I re-read ‘Homage to Catalonia’ a few weeks ago, as described here http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2016/12/george-orwells-homage-to-catalonia-revisited.html
because I was planning (after much reluctance) to visit Barcelona, the New City of Cool. I had for many years refused to go, having seen what fashion and tourism had done to Prague, a place I knew long before it turned into a weekend break. I shuddered at what I might find in the Catalan capital, where I wouldn’t even have the advantage of knowing what it had been like before.
I wondered if it might just destroy my ancient Orwell-inspired mental picture of the place, and replace it with something worse.
But I had, unusually, a week without a column to write, as the Mail on Sunday does not publish on Christmas Day, and, assured by close advisors that Barcelona wasn’t as bad as I feared and might indeed be rewarding, especially in the dead of winter when the tourists were scarce, I set off there by train.
With the plush cushions of the Eurostar (as so often, delayed) under my bum, (Author's note. I have had complaints about my use of the word 'bum' here. It is, as I hoped readers would recognise, a deliberate and conscious reference to and quotation from Orwell's own work. So is another passage below. 'I recall the wonderful closing description of the journey home, the landscape of the mountain and the vine giving way to the meadow and the elm, ‘recovering from seasickness with the plush cushions of the boat train under your bum' ( see link above)).
I travelled first to Paris and then by double-decker TGV from Paris direct to Barcelona, from the country of the meadow and the elm, to the country of the mountain and the vine, in about six hours.
Why do they try to make trains like planes?
As usual, I moaned about the weird ‘security’ procedures for getting on the Eurostar, designed to make it as much like horrible plane travel, and as unlike the great days of the old ‘Golden Arrow’ (on which I went to Paris for the first time in 1965) as possible. Of course I accept the need to show a passport. I am crossing a national border, and believe these should be enforced. I actually like being able to get through French passport control before leaving London, and wish you could do the same on flights to the USA (you can pass through US immigration and customs before boarding your plane at Dublin airport, so allowing you to get straight off at the other end, a huge blessing - which just shows how much more the US government cares about Ireland than it does about Britain and the non-existent ‘Special Relationship’).
But the scanning of luggage for Eurostar passengers seems daft and excessive. It isn’t done on the Paris-Amsterdam Thalys (I am glad to say), or on any other cross-border express service that I know of even though there has been an actual terrorist incident on board that train. Spain insists on it for high-speed services, I know. But I think this is an understandable if excessive response to the massacres on trains in Madrid some years ago, which is Spain’s business.
But what is the logic for doing it on the Eurostar? You might say it was because of the tunnel. But is it? Do they do it on Switzerland’s new Gotthard Base railway tunnel, which at 35.47 miles is longer than the Channel Tunnel? Or on the Japanese Bullet Trains that travel under the sea between Japan’s islands? And why, having gone through these procedures, can’t you just amble up on to the platform and take your seat, in the usual way, instead of being corralled in waiting areas until a few minutes before departure and compelled to rush aboard in crowds which alternate between zombie-like shuffling and sudden panic rushes? When the Channel Tunnel was first suggested, I imagined just going and buying a ticket, showing my passport and walking aboard. Sometimes I yearn for the old ferries, which did produce that sort of feeling, of stepping lightly off the edge of the world into an adventure. Airline procedures kill it, stifling the imagination with enforced waits in low-ceilinged strip-lit halls which must resemble the reception areas of prisons, followed by enforced hurrying on the orders of blaring, indistinct loudspeaker messages.
Bring Back the Railway Dining Car
I am glad about France’s modern trains but wish the modernisation had happened in a different way. Even in France, a far bigger country than ours, the trains go needlessly fast, and their windows are too small. How I regret the passing of the old ‘Mistral’ Trans-Europe-Express whose beautiful buffet car had vast windows from which you could admire the vineyards along the lovely Rhone Valley, while sampling their products in a proper glass, leaning against a bar of beaten copper. I believe its decommissioned coaches are now doing service on Cuba’s Havana-Santiago line.
Even on long journeys French Railways no longer provide restaurants. And TGVs by their nature avoid interesting bits of landscape. They inevitably tend towards the bland and flat parts of the country, as well as having to be hidden behind noise barriers.
France's TGVs are a warning against HS2
Many of the old (more picturesque and interesting) express lines and branch lines have been neglected or closed to keep the TGV programme going, a warning to us as we embark on the futile HS2 project, completely unsuited to our far smaller country. About 100 miles an hour is enough for me, and perhaps the opportunity for a pleasant overnight stop Often the superfast trains call at special stations miles from anywhere, rather than pulling into the old Victorian central Gares from which you might glimpse the Cathedral , the Hotel de Ville and the Place Jean Jaures or Rue Charles de Gaulle, of wherever you were. The gamey ramble through the less alluring suburbs, part of the pleasure of train travel, no longer happens, and in many cases the station itself is a deep concrete pit, far underground.
I made up for a lot of this with good books (I read ‘This Perfect Day’ by Ira Levin, a neglected dystopia, re-read ‘Towards the End of the Morning’ by Michael Frayn, one of the funniest novels ever written about journalists, and began ‘Historically Inevitable?’, a series of essays about whether the Russian revolutions of 1917 were bound to turn out as they did, edited by Tony Brenton, full of discoveries)A picnic also helped, as did eating, before setting off, an absurdly overpriced but justified breakfast in the ‘Train Bleu’ restaurant at the Gare de Lyon.
Sometimes it's necessary to spend too much on breakfast
This gigantic, bombastic station has, in one of its entrance halls, a lovely fresco of an idealised pre-1914 France, (the ‘Grande Fresque de la Gare de Lyon’, painted in 1900 by Jean-Baptiste Olive) though badly-positioned shop fronts make it harder to enjoy them than it used to be. But they are outdone completely by the soaring, joyous murals, also of an idealised France, in the ‘Train Bleu’, a huge, vaulted, light-filled room so astonishingly French in the old way that it is worth being overcharged for your croissant just to enter it. It’s a reminder of the possibilities of civilised travel.
It is also, despite any doubts about high-speed trains, a wonder to step off a train in Barcelona just a little more than six hours after leaving Paris, after glimpses of the Alps and the Massif Central, and long stretches by the rather melancholy lagoons that run along France’s Mediterranean coastline, plus late afternoon views of the Pyrenees. No aeroplane could provide this feeling of distance genuinely travelled and of altered landscapes.
Arriving in a Hole in the Ground
You arrive in Barcelona, alas, in a hole in the ground, an ultra-modern station, though before you get there the fast line runs for a long time just beside the older tracks that Orwell must have taken on his way in - and (fearful of being stopped at the frontier by the Communist secret police) on his way out again in 1937. I went later to the ‘Franca’ station, a proper terminus, near the port, with a curved arched roof, and daylight, where Orwell must have arrived and left on trains which ( as he notes) departed at whimsical times, either far too early, or far too late, or perhaps not at all.
We were staying close to the Ramblas, scene of Orwell’s bizarre rooftop spell of guard-duty as his POUM militia tensed itself for a possible massacre or round-up by its Stalinist Communist rivals. In summer this would be an intolerable tourist swamp, but in winter it was just astonishingly small and intimate, and reasonably easy to imagine in its 1937 form. This feeling that an interesting site should be bigger is one I get in many places you have imagined for a long time. Only Red Square and Tiananmen Square seem big enough for the events they have witnessed. I recall being amazed at how small Dealey Plaza in Dallas is, because I had always pictured the scene of JFK’s assassination as an enormous place, when in fact it is little bigger than the square next to Portsmouth Guildhall.
I had expected the Ramblas to be a colossal avenue, as wide as the Marx Engels Allee in Berlin or the Champs Elysees in Paris. But, as Patrick O‘ Brian’s Captain Aubrey might say, one side is within a biscuit toss of the other. The street (the name allegedly originated with the Arabic world ‘Ramla’, meaning a river and it runs along the course of a dried up stream) must be unbearable in the high tourist season, but in Winter it is just a fairly cheerful avenue with a pleasant wide walk down the middle with the traffic on either side ( this seems to be a uniquely Spanish idea, also to be found on the Paseo de Marti in Havana) and plenty of trees.
In the footsteps of Eric Arthur Blair
Yet here is the underground station (its name ‘Liceu’, now in Catalan rather than the Spanish which would have been used in 1937) into which Orwell watched the crowds fleeing when trouble started (he didn’t follow them, fearing he would then be trapped for hours); here is the (rather lovely) covered market where he bought a slab of goat’s cheese which sustained him much later in a hungry hour.
If you go, these articles are useful as (with one small exception noted in one of them) Barcelona does not much care to remember Orwell, and guidebook mentions are scanty.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/travel/article-1222522/George-Orwells-Barcelona-Exploring-Catalan-capitals-civil-war-ghosts.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/spain/catalonia/barcelona/articles/George-Orwells-Barcelona/
Here, now gaily painted and turned into a library, is the former headquarters of the POUM militia which Orwell had unwittingly joined, not realising this placed him in the midst of a faction fight. Here, severely modernised, is the Café Moka, barricaded by a squad of Guardia Civil during the tense days of 1937, just opposite the strange turreted building where Orwell kept watch from the roof. Here is where the old Hotel Continental (it has moved) stood, where Orwell’s wife Eileen sat in bed as political police (who, being Spanish, were too well-mannered and courteous to search the bed itself) conducted a search of the couple’s room, and in whose reception hall his wife warned him, with a fixed smile on her face, to get out quickly before he was arrested.
A pleasant purpose
Identifying these places gave a pleasant purpose to my wanderings. Of all the major European languages Spanish is the one I know least (and I am not fluent, or even competent in any of them), but I have lately come to enjoy Spain more than anywhere else on the continent except perhaps Paris and Berlin.
Barcelona has many different pleasures. The narrow, intimate area around the 14th century Cathedral, especially on a late winter afternoon, has a rather thrilling air of time travel, as if one has wandered into the 1930s. The streets wind so much that you can get lost, and it took me a long time to find the haunting square of St Philip Neri (I will not try to do Catalan or Spanish spellings) where a church façade, gouged, disfigured, mutilated and pocked, commemorates the deaths, by Italian Fascist bombing, of a number of innocent children, during the Civil War.
The haunting cries of children in a tragic square
There were schoolchildren of today playing in it when I eventually found it, their loud, happy shouts audible from the narrow alley by which I approached it, at least I assume they were schoolchildren of today. The Cathedral itself, whose cloisters are home to a flock of geese, resembled in many ways one of its English cousins, especially the glorious carved choir and its humorous, rustic misericords (the little shelf-like semi-seats on which the choir might seek a little rest during long mediaeval services), or rather, one of its English cousins as it might have been before the Reformation took away much of the gaudy colour and gold.
Too much like drinking from a bed bottle
Further down, towards the old station and the port, there are small bars where some guests still drink wine by squirting it into their mouths from the odd flasks which Orwell described ( and disliked because they reminded him of bed bottles, especially when filled with white wine) . I lacked both the nerve and the command of the language to give this a try.
And then, north of the Plaza Catalunya (ruined by modern architecture) there is the huge Edwardian new city, which has (like some parts of Madrid) a strange feel of Moscow because of the monstrous width of the avenues and the overbearing grandeur of some of the big office buildings. It is also in many ways a Catalan version of similar districts of Strasbourg, Vienna or Prague, street after wide street of wondrously solid and opulent great blocks of flats, with their majestic brass lifts, carved stone frontages (often very elaborate and fascinating), full of what turned out to be misplaced optimism about the 20th century.
The Gloom That Hangs Forever Over Certain Streets
Even so, they did not have the horrible lowering effects which their more northern equivalent have on me. When I see such buildings in Paris, Strasbourg, Vienna or Prague, I imagine the miserable sight, which I always imagine in late evening, of Jewish families being led from them by courteous police officers, to a fate which both Jews and police officers suspect but do not know and prefer not to think about, whereas we do know, and we have to think about it. This horror at least did not happen in Spain, though plenty of others did. Orwell must have wandered these streets wearing his feet out during the days and nights when he was being hunted, and dared not enter a hotel or restaurant known to be used by POUM types.
Finally I came to Gaudi’s Basilica of the Holy family, the Sagrada Familia. I had for many years scoffed at this building (perhaps influenced by Orwell’s jeering dismissal of it in ‘Homage to Catalonia’, in which he wishes that the Anarchists had destroyed it (in fact they spared it as a cultural monument) and says it looks like a collection of enormous Hock bottles.
Having now seen it for myself, I am an unequivocal admirer of Gaudi’s astonishing unfinished work. It is a modern attempt to do what the mediaeval church builders did, and to express in stone the Word of God.
The Astonishing Power of Carved Stone
The glass does nothing for me. In general, I think modern stained glass fails to even begin to rival the beauty and power achieved by the artists of Chartres, Fairford, or York. Abstract patterns are no substitute for the intricate blue beauty of the older technique, and modern representational windows cannot help looking modern. Their makers know too much of the material world to make a good job of portraying eternity and myth.
But I forgive this failing, because of the astonishing power of the carving of both visible fronts of the Cathedral, the Passion and the Glory, and also because of the moving power of the interior, which is rather like being inside a great grove of trees. Both fronts, if they survive, would give a visitor from space a good idea of the great Bible stories (and some non-Bible ones) which underlie Christian belief. It is well worth getting a detailed guide to them, or you might miss the demon tempting a man with a bomb (it is a specific type of bomb used in Barcelona in outrages in 1903), or the serpent hissing behind Judas as he betrays Our Lord. I’ve seen and appreciated beautiful Cathedral West fronts from Lincoln to Berne, to Cologne and Autun. And this is obviously a work of our time, not a deeply disturbing message from the far past, that we are perhaps not as clever or wonderful as we think, as the older ones are.
But it is wholly in the same tradition as its forerunners (as say, Coventry simply is not, and as the majestic but plainer Liverpool Anglican Cathedral does not try to be, because it is a post-Reformation Protestant building and cannot pretend otherwise), and the force of it is enormous, if you study it. The older and more traditional Glory facade, in which the stone seems sometimes to be about to burst into flower, making me think of James Elroy Flecker’s lovely poem ‘The Old Ships’ which ends
‘It was so old a ship - who knows, who knows?
- And yet so beautiful, I watched in vain
To see the mast burst open with a rose,
And the whole deck put on its leaves again.’
The towers, that everyone has seen in pictures, are not entirely to my taste(I can see what Orwell meant about bottles of Hock, a word you don’t hear much now) . But in the end they are the clear descendants of the Rhineland lattice style of spire which you find at Strasbourg and at Freiburg-im-Breisgau, they are in keeping with the general forest-like nature of the building, and they seize the sky. What a pity that a God-despising age has begun to litter Barcelona with modern secular skyscrapers which diminish the power of its religious buildings.
A cup of coffee in Huesca
I think I shall go back again, but only in the dead of winter, and perhaps by another route. Every time I go to Spain, I feel I have failed a little, if I return without having a cup of coffee in Huesca, a desire which readers of ‘Homage to Catalonia’ will understand (the rest of you will just have to read it).
