Thursday, August 27, 2020

Flashback, August 1945: Orwell’s Long-Delayed ‘Animal Farm’ Satirizes Soviet Tyranny


Though now virtually a canonical text of the Cold War, Animal Farm initially encountered significant roadblocks to publication. Secker and Warburg, which released the satire by George Orwell 75 years ago this month, was the fifth house that the iconoclastic left-wing journalist had approached, only to be turned down—including for explicitly political reasons.

At Faber and Faber, poet-editor T.S. Eliot, after conferring with colleagues, informed Orwell although his writing was good, “We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time.”

Outside of the context of the original letter, Eliot’s rationale sounds opaque notes that readers of his poetry might appreciate. But Orwell had little trouble deciphering it, for elsewhere in the message, Eliot took note of the “Trotskyite” perspective of the narration. Anyone reading between the lines would immediately understand that this might upset a key partner in Great Britain’s “Grand Alliance” against Nazi Germany: Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Orwell conceived his devastating depiction of the Soviet Union as a failed utopia in the form of a beast fable about “Manor Farm”—so called because of the aristocrats who controlled it for years. The granular details of his allegory were inspired by time spent from 1936 to 1940 in a cottage in Wallington, near London, where the journalist kept chickens, goats and geese.

But, for contemporary readers, the primary interest of Orwell’s bitter satire—what led it to be banned in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries now falling under its sway—lay in characters whose motives, decisions and fates resembled the ideological battles among Socialists, Communists and the latter’s Trotskyite splinter faction. In particular, they were modeled on world-famous leaders of the prior three decades dating back to the Russian Revolution:

* Mr. Jones, the failing farmer whose misrule eventually leads to a revolt by his animals, stands for Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who was overthrown in 1917 and, with the rest of his family, put to death a year later;

* Old Major, the pig who organizes the animal revolt and insists on their equality, represents Vladimir Lenin—and, like the Bolshevik leader, dies before many of his ideas can become reality;

* Napoleon signifies Stalin—even to the point of being named for another dictator who used the chaotic aftermath of a revolution as a ladder to absolute power;

* Snowball, who loses out in a power struggle with Napoleon—and then is driven off the farm by dogs acting at the behest of the vengeful victor—is based on Leon Trotsky, who  was driven into exile by Stalin in 1929 and assassinated in Mexico on the dictator’s orders in 1940.

Swiftly, Orwell traces how his bestial revolutionaries become acclimated step by step to erosions of their freedom to the point where they yield to a Soviet-style cult of personality:

“It had become usual to give Napoleon the credit for every successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, ‘Under the guidance of our leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days,’ or two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, ‘Thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!”

The infamous Moscow “show trials” of the mid-to-late Thirties, when a paranoid Stalin set in motion trumped-up charges against longtime major Communist Party leaders, are also evoked:

“They had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.”

With Napoleon amending to absurdity one of Old Major’s foundational principles (“All Animals Are Equal But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others”), Orwell anticipated a notion he would explore a few years later in greater depth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: doublethink, or indoctrination-induced acceptance of a patently false idea or of two ideas mutually contradictory to each other.

Orwell hinted in Animal Farm at the major enablers of the new absolutist regime in Europe: the silent intellectuals who could have sparked widespread dissent:

“Several of [the animals] would have protested if they could have found the right arguments. Even Boxer was vaguely troubled. He set his ears back, shook his forelock several times, and tried hard to marshal his thoughts; but in the end he could not think of anything to say.”

This bewilderment over the complicity of the intellectuals—first triggered by Orwell’s service with the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, when he was shocked into disillusionment by Stalinist purges in Barceleona—hardened into contempt as he attempted to find a publisher for his new satire.

To fulfill the obligations of a contract calling for the submission of his next two novels, Orwell sent the manuscript to the man who published his first nonfiction title, Down and Out in Paris in London: Victor Gollancz. The old-line left-wing publisher, who preferred to mute any of his own reservations about Stalinism, did not surprise Orwell in the least when he quickly rejected this satire.

Eliot’s refusal, less expected because it came from some with more conservative political and religious convictions, was more painful. But the turndown of the manuscript that provoked Orwell the most came at the hands of the British publisher Jonathan Cape, which had committed to accepting it until being warned off by a government official. Orwell included their timorous critique in the preface he eventually wrote for Animal Farm:

I mentioned the reaction I had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think … I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste of the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offense to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.

Orwell did not name that “important official in the Ministry of Information,” but he had a hunch that this bureaucrat harbored pro-Soviet sentiments—a belief given concrete form in 1949, when the writer included him on a list given to a friend in Britain's Foreign Office of 38 intellectuals who were “crypto-communist fellow travelers or inclined that way.”

Although some names on that list emerged more from Orwell’s prejudices than any real fact, he was correct to be suspicious of Peter Smollett. Only in 1990, a decade after his death, with the brief opening of Soviet intelligence archives, was it confirmed that Smollett, a past London correspondent for several European papers, was in reality Hans-Peter Smolka, part of the Soviet spy ring centered around Kim Philby.

Smollett’s interference delayed publication of Animal Farm for a year, leaving Orwell smoldering enough to blast “the servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards.” It was safe to print criticisms of Prime Minister Winston Churchill during this period, but not the nation’s Soviet ally, he charged.

Orwell’s denunciation of these abject intellectuals has lost none of its bite with the passage of 75 years, nor has his eloquent defense of the right to advocate the unfashionable and inconvenient: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” 

Worn down by his struggle against tuberculosis, he would continue through the four years remaining to him to raise the alarm against threats to freedom, particularly in his last novel, when he dispensed with the fable form for a searing dystopian nightmare: Nineteen Eighty-Four.

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