A Life in Letters

by George Orwell

  [XVII, 2825, p. 456; typewritten]

  1.John Morris was one of Orwell's colleagues at the BBC. Their relations were rather sour. For an unfavourable account of Orwell by Morris, see his 'Some Are More Equal than Others,' Penguin New Writing, No. 40 (1950); as 'That Curiously Crucified Expression', in Orwell Remembered, pp. 171-76, and Crick's comments thereon, pp. 419-20.

  Jura

  1946 and 1947

  Now that Animal Farm is seen as one of the greatest books of the twentieth century, it is remarkable how difficult it was to get it published in England and in the USA. There were simple physical problems in England - paper was in very short supply - but other forces conspired to ensure that Orwell became so desperate over rejections that he considered publishing the book himself. T. S. Eliot, for Faber & Faber, opined on behalf of the directors (of which he was one) that they had 'no conviction . . . that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time' and later, 'your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals . . . so that what was needed . . . was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs'. Warburg was willing but had no paper and when he eventually secured some could only initially print 4,500 copies. No US publisher saw the book's merits - there was no market, one publisher said, for animal stories - but eventually Harcourt, Brace took the risk and on 26 August 1946 published 50,000 copies. Then as a Book of the Month Club edition there were print runs of 430,000 and 110,000 and Orwell was suddenly earning major royalties: his first advance was $37,500. Foreign versions proliferated (although Orwell never took royalties from oppressed peoples), and sometimes there were comic side-effects. Thus, the French translation was to be Union des Republiques Socialistes Animales - URSA, The Bear. Because that might offend Communists, it was changed to Les Animaux Partout!; Napoleon became Cesar. Misunderstanding abounded. Orwell subtitled his book, A Fairy Story. Only British and Telugu versions in Orwell's lifetime included this description. It was never acceptable in the USA. Yet one of the origins of Animal Farm is Beatrix Potter's Pigling Bland, a favourite of Orwell's and Jacintha Buddicom's childhood.

  Orwell was still busy writing and this period saw the publication of 'The Prevention of Literature', 'Decline of English Murder', 'Politics and the English Language' (one of his most important essays), the delightful 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad', 'Why I Write', 'Politics vs Literature', and 'How the Poor Die' (looking back to his time in a hospital in Paris in March 1929). He also wrote three radio plays: 'The Voyage of the Beagle', 'Little Red Riding Hood' for Children's Hour, and his own adaptation of Animal Farm.

  From 23 May to 13 October 1946 Orwell rented Barnhill, Jura and started writing Nineteen Eighty-Four, completing about fifty pages that year. He was at Barnhill from 11 April to 20 December 1947 and although he was ill from time to time, it was also a very happy period. He cultivated his land, walked, went fishing, and played with Richard. Despite wishing to get on with Nineteen Eighty-Four, he found time to write 'Such, Such Were the Joys', which he sent to Warburg but which could not be published until after his death for fear of libel charges.

  On 3 May 1946 his older sister, Marjorie, died and he travelled south to attend her funeral. His younger sister, Avril, came to share his life at Barnhill (see her letter, 1.7.46), and he gave up The Stores in September 1947. By October he had become so ill he had to work in bed, and by the end of the year 'extensive' TB (see 23.12.47) had been diagnosed and he left Jura for Hairmyres Hospital in East Kilbride, near Glasgow.

  From Orwell's letter to his mother, 24 March 1912

  To Dwight Macdonald*

  3 January 1946

  27 B Canonbury Square

  Islington N 1

  Dear Dwight,

  Many thanks for your letter of December 31st. I'm so glad you read Animal Farm and liked it.1 I asked Warburg to send you a copy, but knowing how desperately short he was of copies of the first edition, I wasn't sure whether you would get one. Neither he nor I now have a copy of that edition. A month or two back the Queen sent to Warburg's for a copy (this doesn't mean anything politically: her literary adviser is Osbert Sitwell who would probably advise her to read a book of that type), and as there wasn't one left the Royal Messenger had to go down to the Anarchist bookshop run by George Woodcock, which strikes me as mildly comic. However now a second edition of 10 thousand has come out, also a lot of translations are being done. I have just fixed up to have it done in the USA by a firm named Harcourt & Brace who I believe are good publishers. I had a lot of difficulty to place it in the USA. The Dial Press who had been pestering me for some time for a book rejected it on the ground that 'the American public is not interested in animals' (or words to that effect.) I think it will get a bit of pre-publicity in the USA as Time rang up saying they were going to review it and asking me for the usual particulars. I also had an awful fight to get it into print over here. No one except Warburg would look at it, and W. had to hold it up for a year for lack of paper. Even as it is he has only been able to print about half as many copies as he could have sold. Even the M[inistry] O[f] I[information] horned in and tried to keep it out of print. The comic thing is that after all this fuss the book got almost no hostile reception when it came out. The fact is people are fed up with this Russian nonsense and it's just a question of who is first to say 'The Emperor has no clothes on.'2

  I feel very guilty that I still haven't done you that article on the 'comics.' The thing is that I am inconceivably busy. I have to do on average 4 articles a week and have hardly any energy left over for serious work. However I have roughly sketched out an article which I shall do some time. I am going to call it 'An American Reverie' and in it I shall contrast these papers with the American books and papers which I, like most people about my age, was partly brought up on.3 I noticed with interest that the G.Is in Germany were mostly reading this kind of stuff, which seems to be aimed at children and adults indifferently.

  I have another book coming out in the USA shortly, a book of reprinted articles, and I have included that one on 'Miss Blandish' which you printed. I'm afraid I didn't ask your permission, but I didn't suppose you'd mind. I have made the usual acknowledgements.

  Did you see Polemic, the new paper Humphrey Slater* has started? I dare say it didn't get to you as they only did 3000 of the first number. The second number will be 5000 and then they hope to work up to 8000, but they can only become a monthly by stealth. One is not allowed to start new periodicals, but you can get hold of a little paper if you call yourself a publisher, and you have to start off by pretending that what you are publishing is a book or pamphlet. The first number was rather dull and very badly got-up, but I have great hopes of it because we have great need of some paper in which one can do long and serious literary-political articles.

  David Martin4 is over in Canada and was going to look you up if he is in New York. He has great schemes for starting an international review in several languages. Arthur Koestler* is also very anxious to start something like what the League for the Rights of Man used to be before it was stalinised. No doubt you will be hearing from him about this.

  All the best and thanks for writing.

  Yours

  Geo. Orwell

  [XVIII, 2839, pp. 11-13; typewritten]

  1.Macdonald had written to Orwell on 31 December 1945: '"Animal Farm" . . . is absolutely superb. The transposition of the Russian experience into farm equivalents is done with perfect taste and skill, so that what might have been simply a witty burlesque becomes something more--really a tragedy. The pathos of the Russian degeneration comes out more strongly in your fairy tale than in anything I've read in a long time. The ending is not a letdown, as I should have thought it would have had to be, but is instead one more triumph of inventiveness. Congratulations on a beautifully done piece of writing.' He asked if the book were to be published in America; he thought two or three hundred copies could be sold to readers of Politics.

  2.Macdonald reprinted the section of Orwell's
letter from 'A month or two back' to 'has no clothes on' in Politics, March 1946, and then continued: 'What struck me about Animal Farm, in addition to the literary tact with which it is done so that it never becomes either whimsical or boringly tendentious, was that I had rarely been made so aware of the pathos of the whole Russian experience. This fairy tale about animals, whose mood is reflective rather than indignant, conveys more of the terrible human meaning of Stalinism than any of the many serious books on the subject, with one or two exceptions.'

  3.'An American Reverie' was not published and no manuscript has been traced.

  4.David Martin (1914-) was a Canadian airman whom Orwell befriended.

  To Arthur Koestler*

  10 January 1946

  27B Canonbury Square

  Islington N 1

  Dear Arthur,

  I saw Barbara Ward1 and Tom Hopkinson2 today and told them about our project. They were both a little timid, chiefly I think because they realise that an organisation of this type would in practice be anti-Russian, or would be compelled to become anti-Russian, and they are going through an acute phase of anti-Americanism. However they are anxious to hear more and certainly are not hostile to the idea. I said the next step would be to show them copies of the draft manifesto, or whatever it is, when drawn up. I wonder if you have seen Bertrand Russell, and if so, what he said. I have no doubt these two would help to the extent of passing our ideas on to others, but at some stage it might be more useful to contact Hulton 3 personally, which I could do. I haven't found out anything significant about the League for the Rights of Man. No one seems to have much about it in their files. All I can discover is that it is still in existence in France, and that it did exist in Germany up to Hitler, so it must have been an international organisation. There is something about it in Wells's Crux Ansata 4 (which I can't get hold of), so it is possible that it drew up the Declaration of the Rights of Man which Wells is always burbling about. But I am certain that some years before the war it had become a Stalinist organisation, as I distinctly remember that it refused to intervene in favour of the Trotskyists in Spain: nor so far as I remember did it do anything about the Moscow trials. But one ought to verify all this.

  I hope you are all well. I am very busy as usual. I had lunch with Negrin 5 the other day, but couldn't get much information out of him. I never manage to see him quite alone. But I still feel fairly sure that he is not the Russians' man, as he was credited with being during the civil war. However I don't suppose it makes much difference, as I am afraid there is not much chance of Negrin's lot getting back when Franco moves out. I am also having lunch with Beaverbrook next week. If I get a chance to speak to him on equal terms at all I shall ask him about Stalin, whom after all he has seen at close quarters a number of times.

  The French publisher who had signed a contract to translate Animal Farm has got cold feet and says it is impossible 'for political reasons.' It's really sad to think a thing like that happening in France, of all countries in the world. However I dare say one of the others will risk it. Did I tell you I had fixed an American edition?

  The book of essays is printing and they say they can't make alterations in the text, but we are going to put in an erratum slip, at any rate about the German-English business.6

  Please give my love to Mamaine.7 Richard is very well. Celia came to tea on Tuesday and saw him have his bath.

  Yours

  George

  P.S. I don't think I ever thanked you for our stay. I have a sort of inhibition about that, because as a child I was taught to say 'Thank you for having me' after a party, and it seemed to me such an awful phrase.

  [XVIII, 2852, pp. 27-9; typewritten]

  1.Barbara Ward (1914-81; DBE, 1974; Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth, 1976, economist and writer on politics; assistant editor The Economist, 1939-57. A Governor of the BBC, 1946-50. She was known for her concerns for individual freedom and civil rights.

  2.Tom Hopkinson (1905-90; Kt. 1978), author, editor, and journalist. He was associated especially with Picture Post which he helped launch and edited 1940-50. He taught journalism at British and American universities, 1967-75 and wrote a British Council pamphlet on Orwell (1953). Of his two biographies, Of This Our Time (1982) is concerned with the period when Orwell was working.

  3.Edward Hulton (1906-1988; Kt., 1957), lawyer, magazine publisher of liberal views, proprietor of Picture Post at this time. His The New Age was published in 1943 and reviewed by Orwell in the Observer, 15 August 1943 (XV, 2237, 201-2).

  4.Crux Ansata: An Indictment of the Roman Catholic Church (Penguin Special, 1943). Orwell had got the wrong Penguin Special, however. In May 1940 Penguin Books published H.G. Wells's The Rights of Man, Or, What Are We Fighting For? Chapter X discussed a Complement a la Declaration des Droits de l'homme, which had been passed by a congress of the Ligue des Droits de l'homme at Dijon in July 1936. Wells said this document was 'more plainly feminist and less simply equalitarian in sexual matters' than what was proposed in his book, and it made 'a distinction between "travail" and "loisirs" which we do not recognise'. He then gave the text.

  5.Dr Juan Negrin (1889-1956), Socialist Prime Minister of Spain from September 1936 for much of the civil war. He went to France in 1939 and set up a Spanish government in exile; he resigned from its premiership in 1945 in the hope of uniting all exiles. (See Thomas, pp. 949—50.) 6.To Orwell's essay on Koestler.

  7.Mamaine Koestler (nee Paget, 1916-54), Koestler's wife and twin sister of Celia Kirwan.*

  To Geoffrey Gorer*

  22 January 1946

  27B Canonbury Square

  Islington N 1

  Dear Geoffrey,

  It was too good of you to send all those things. They were greatly appreciated here, especially by Richard, who had a big whack of the plum pudding and seemed none the worse afterwards. I was amused by the 'this is an unsolicited gift' on the outside, which I suppose is a formula necessitated by people over here writing cadging letters. I had quite a good Christmas. I went to Wales to stay with Arthur Koestler for a few days while the nurse went away with her own kid.1 Richard went out to a lot of parties where he was the only child, and except for occasionally dirtying his trousers (I still can't get him house-trained) behaved with great aplomb and sat up to table in an ordinary chair. But of course the travelling just before and just after Xmas was fearful. To leave London you had to queue up 2 hours before the train left, and coming back the train was 4 hours late and landed one in town about half an hour after the undergrounds had stopped. However, fortunately Richard enjoys travelling, and I think when you are carrying a child you have a slightly better chance with porters.

  It is foully cold here and the fuel shortage is just at its worst. We only got a ton of coal for the whole winter and it's almost impossible to get logs. Meanwhile the gas pressure is so low that one can hardly get a gas fire to light, and one can only get about 11/2 gallons of lamp oil a week. What I do is to light the fires with a little of the coal I have left and keep them damped down all day with blocks of wet peat of which I happen to have a few. It's so much easier in the country where if you're absolutely forced to you can go out and scrounge firewood. Otherwise things aren't bad here. Food is about the same as ever. Yesterday I took Sillonedeg2 and his wife out to dinner. They were only here for a few days and were still in a state of being astonished at the food, all the English in Rome having told them we were starving over here. I am always ashamed when people come to England for the first time like that, and say to them 'Don't think England is like this in peacetime,' but the S.s. said that for cleanness and state of repair London was a dream compared with Rome. They said that in Rome you could get anything if you had enough money, but an overcoat, for instance, cost the equivalent of PS120.

  Didn't you tell me you met Dennis Collings* in Malaya? He was an anthropologist, and I think latterly was curator of the museum in Singapore. I used to know him very well. He got home recently and I heard from him the other day. He had been captured in Java
and appeared not to have had absolutely too bad a time, having been a camp interpreter.

  I forget if I'd started doing weekly articles for the Evening Standard before you left. In spite of--by my standards--enormous fees it doesn't do me much good financially, because one extra article a week just turns the scale and makes it necessary for me to have a secretary.3 However, even with the extra article she takes a certain amount of drudgery off me, and I am using her to arrange and catalogue my collection of pamphlets.4 I find that up to date I have about 1200, but of course they keep on accumulating. I have definitely arranged I am going to stop doing the Evening Standard stuff and most other journalism in May, and take six months off to write another novel. If the Jura place can be put in order this year I shall go there, otherwise I shall take a furnished house somewhere in the country, preferably by the sea, but anyway somewhere I can't be telephoned to. My book of reprints ought to be out soon and the American title is Dickens, Dali and others. Scribners5 are doing that one, and Harcourt Brace (I think that is the name) are doing Animal Farm. I don't fancy that one will sell in the USA, though of course it might sell heavily, as with most books in America it seems you either sell 100,000 copies or nothing. I have arranged a lot of translations of A.F., but the French publishers who signed the first contract have already got cold feet and say it's impossible at present 'for political reasons.' I think it's sad to think of a thing like that happening, in France of all countries.