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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