Orwell can be forgiven for failing as an election pundit. A greater disappointment was his muted enthusiasm for a government that went on to do more to make democratic socialism a reality than any Labour administration before or since. Attlee’s brand of socialism was patriotic, pragmatic, both anti-imperialist and anti-Stalinist, grounded in “the fundamental decencies of life,” and informed, in his youth, by the friendly utopianism of William Morris and Edward Bellamy. Attlee’s insistence that socialism must be reconfigured “in accordance with the native genius of the people of that country” echoed The Lion and the Unicorn, and Labour’s agenda overlapped considerably with that essay’s six-point programme.
Orwell, however, was close to the Labour left and shared its dim view of Attlee’s statesmanship. Bevan, now minister of health, had recently said that Attlee “brings to the fierce struggle of politics the tepid enthusiasm of a lazy summer afternoon at a cricket match.” Tribune, nodding to H. G. Wells, dubbed him “the invisible man.” Orwell himself had once compared the Labour leader to “a recently dead fish, before it has had time to stiffen,” so he was being relatively kind when he now called Attlee “colourless” and lacking “the magnetism that a statesman needs nowadays.”19 But even as he worried about the government’s capacity to solve immense problems at home and abroad, he thought that the party’s surprise landslide was welcome proof that the British people had not lost their heads. “As a sign of the vitality of democracy,” Orwell wrote in the American magazine Commentary, “of the power of the English-speaking peoples to get along without fuehrers, the outcome of this election is a thing to be rejoiced at, even if the men it has brought to power should utterly fail.” The election posters of Churchill’s face, he noticed, were reassuringly small compared to those of Stalin or de Gaulle.
While he was still in Europe, Orwell made a last-minute request to Secker & Warburg to change one word of Animal Farm, in a description of the autocratic Napoleon, to reflect the fact that Stalin had not fled Moscow when the Germans advanced. “I just thought the alteration would be fair to J.S.,” he wrote. “J.S.” may have been a murderous tyrant, but that was no reason to call him a coward. “To me this single sentence throws as much light on Orwell’s character as any I know,” said Warburg.
Orwell claimed two years later that the impulse behind the book dated back to his time in Spain, which left him convinced that “the destruction of the Soviet myth is essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” And vice versa. Having seen revolutionary idealism destroyed in Barcelona, he thought it essential to create a workable alternative to Stalinism. He thought the task would require a book that could be universally understood in any language.
Notwithstanding some artistic licence with the chronology, Animal Farm is a scrupulous allegory of Russian history from the revolution to the Tehran conference. Each animal represents an individual—Napoleon is Stalin, Snowball is Trotsky, Mr. Frederick is Hitler, and so on—or a common type. Yet at the same time, and despite its abundant wit, the story can bring to tears a reader who knows nothing of Russia. “It is a sad fable,” wrote Graham Greene, “and it is an indication of Mr. Orwell’s fine talent that it is really sad—not a mere echo of human failings at one remove.” When Boxer, the hardworking, gullible horse, is sent to the knacker’s yard, it is Boxer that the reader mourns, not a clever symbol of the Russian proletariat.
Orwell called Animal Farm “a sort of fairy story, really a fable with a political meaning.” He loved fairy tales, adapting The Emperor’s New Clothes and Little Red Riding Hood for radio, and pondering a version of Cinderella, which he considered “the tops.” His farmyard tragedy is something a child can feel keenly: hopes dashed, goodness betrayed, lies unpunished. One such child was the nine-year-old Margaret Atwood. “To say that I was horrified by this book would be an understatement,” she remembered. “The fate of the farm animals was so grim, the pigs were so mean and mendacious and treacherous, the sheep were so stupid. Children have a keen sense of injustice, and this was the thing that upset me the most: the pigs were so unjust.”
Animal Farm can be read as a thematic prequel to Nineteen Eighty-Four: first the revolution betrayed, than tyranny triumphant. Although there are passing references to a revolution and civil war in Oceania, following a limited nuclear war, there is no clear description of how Ingsoc seized and cemented power, but Animal Farm strongly suggests how it played out, with Snowball as a younger version of the “sinister enchanter” Goldstein, transformed by paranoia into “some kind of invisible influence, pervading the air about them and menacing them with all kinds of dangers.” In fact, an early draft of Nineteen Eighty-Four winked at Animal Farm by having O’Brien compare the unlikelihood of a prole uprising with the “theoretical possibility that the animals might one day revolt against mankind and conquer the earth.”
The two books also share an obsession with the erosion and corruption of memory. The word remember appears 110 times in Nineteen Eighty-Four, memory forty-seven, and forget or forgotten forty-six. Whereas in Oceania the manipulation of the past is an elaborate industrial process, in Animal Farm it is described with an eerie ambiguity, as if it were a magic spell: “They all remembered, or thought they remembered . . .” Only the reader can see clearly how the animals’ memories are gradually erased.
Firstly, by the falsification of evidence. The seven commandments of the revolution are gradually amended and ultimately reduced to one famous oxymoron: “ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS.” When the other animals protest, Napoleon’s lieutenant Squealer asks, “Are you certain that this is not something you have dreamed, comrades? Have you any record of this resolution? Is it written down anywhere?” Of course it is not, and therefore they must be mistaken. And if Squealer has statistics “proving” that life is better now, then it must be better. Winston Smith remembers that aeroplanes existed in his childhood, so the Party could not have invented them, “But you could prove nothing. There was never any evidence.”
Secondly, by the infallibility of the leader. When Boxer swears that Snowball was a war hero, and not a traitor all along, Squealer cites Napoleon as the ultimate authority. “Ah, that is different!” Boxer relents. “If Comrade Napoleon says it, it must be right.” The propagandist poet Minimus glorifies him as a figure of godlike (or Big Brother–like) omniscience: “Thou watchest over all / Comrade Napoleon.”
Thirdly, by language. Only the pigs, the “brainworkers,” can write, so only they control the narrative. When they contract the vocabulary (“Four legs good, two legs bad” is proto-Newspeak), they narrow the range of thought. Other ideas are drowned out by the bleated slogans of the sheep, or rendered beyond articulation. Clover knows that this is not what the animals fought and laboured for, “though she lacked the words to express it.” In Newspeak, similarly, dissent cannot be voiced because “the necessary words were not available.”
Ultimately, by time. The old revolutionaries leave or die, while new animals are born or bought: a generation of four-legged Gletkins with nothing to forget. Winston Smith reflects that within twenty years, “the huge and simple question, ‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’ would have ceased once and for all to be answerable.” The war on memory would be complete.
In June 1945, Orwell told Warburg that he had written twelve pages of his next novel and hired a housekeeper to help look after Richard. Susan Watson adored her new employer, and he appreciated the way her vivacity brought light into a home that was dusty with grief. He also enjoyed her chocolate cake. “Once it went sad in the middle,” she remembered, “but he liked them sad, you see. He liked things that went wrong a little.”
He certainly did. On a fundamental level, Orwell believed himself to be a failure, at home with defeat. Warburg noticed that he “never liked being associated with anything that was too powerful or successful.” Many of Orwell’s friends, however, believed that he was destined for greatness. In September 1941, Inez Holden had atten
ded the PEN world congress lunch along with Arthur Koestler, Cyril Connolly and Stevie Smith, and Koestler had wagered five bottles of burgundy that Orwell would have a bestseller within five years.
Koestler won the bet with a year to spare. Published on August 17, Animal Farm: A Fairy Story quickly sold all the copies that Secker & Warburg had the paper to print: almost twenty thousand. Orwell was proud to at last be able to pick up the tab after a lunch with Warburg. He was pleasantly shocked, given his struggle to find a publisher, by the chorus of praise from critics, inevitably excepting The Daily Worker and The New Statesman. Foreign translations brought further acclaim, even if the only words he could make out in some reviews were Swift and Gulliver. “I have been surprised by the unfriendly reactions it didn’t get,” he told Partisan Review founder Philip Rahv. Orwell’s only cause for complaint was that some bookshops had mistakenly racked it in the children’s section, so he took it upon himself to relocate copies to their rightful position.
Animal Farm was also a hit with people he had never sought to impress. Churchill’s son Randolph borrowed a copy; the Queen was said to have read it; Lord Beaverbrook, the belligerently right-wing newspaper baron whom Orwell had memorably described as “looking more like a monkey on a stick than you would think possible for anyone who was not doing it on purpose,” invited him to lunch. Soon, Orwell was forced to remind admirers that he was in fact a socialist. When the Duchess of Atholl invited him to speak at a meeting of the right-leaning League for European Freedom, he explained that he could not respect an organisation which championed freedom in Europe but not in India. “I belong to the Left and must work inside it,” he wrote back, “much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence on this country.”
Orwell had told A. J. Ayer in Paris that he was worried about gratifying his political enemies. William Empson expressed similar concerns in a friendly letter: “the danger of this kind of perfection is that it means very different things to different readers . . . I thought it worth warning you . . . that you must expect to be ‘misunderstood’ on a large scale about this book; it is a form that inherently means more than the author means, when it is handled sufficiently well.” The author of Seven Types of Ambiguity was absolutely right, and twice over: everything he said about Animal Farm would be doubly applicable to Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Plaudits from the right raised eyebrows on the left, mostly due to uncertainty about what Orwell was saying about revolution.20 Some of former Partisan Review editor Dwight Macdonald’s friends in New York thought the message was “to hell with it and hail the status quo.” Orwell’s old foe Kingsley Martin accused him of “reaching the exhaustion of idealism and approaching the bathos of cynicism” and perceived the author in Benjamin, the dour old donkey to whom life is always “hunger, hardship and disappointment” whoever’s in charge. But Benjamin sounds much more like a pessimistic conservative than Orwell, who made clear in his essay on Koestler that one can reject the possibility of paradise on Earth without giving up on the idea that life can be improved.
It’s notable that there is no Lenin surrogate in Animal Farm. By folding Lenin’s finest qualities into the visionary boar old Major and his basest into Napoleon, Orwell left his assessment ambiguous although he wrote shortly after the book’s publication that “all the seeds of evil were there from the start and . . . things would not have been substantially different if Lenin or Trotsky had remained in control.” Yet to read Animal Farm as simply anti-revolutionary is to think that Orwell preferred Mr. Jones. Major’s rhetoric is genuinely inspiring, and the animals’ post-revolutionary ecstasy is justified. “The most encouraging fact about revolutionary activity is that, although it always fails, it always continues,” Orwell wrote in 1948. “The vision of a world of free and equal human beings, living together in a state of brotherhood . . . never materialises, but the belief in it never seems to die out.”
For Orwell, the story’s point of no return comes when the other animals allow the pigs to monopolise the milk and apples, an episode which represents the crushing of the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, the last stand of democratic socialism in Russia. “If people think I am defending the status quo,” he told Macdonald, “that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism.” Animal Farm would not be half as sad without the knowledge that things could have been different.
Animal Farm was launched, narrowly, into a post-war world. Orwell had written to David Astor from Paris in April, volunteering to travel to Burma in November to document the final stages of the war with Japan for The Observer, but the end came sooner than he expected. On August 14, three days before the publication of Animal Farm, Orwell was on Fleet Street when the news broke that Japan was about to surrender. Office workers shredded paper and rained confetti on people celebrating in the street below. Orwell’s reaction was perversely irritable: “In England you can’t get paper to print books on, but apparently there is always plenty of it for this kind of thing.”
The jubilation was short-lived. Rationing, acute housing shortages, and the sudden cessation of lend-lease money from the US fostered a widespread sense of anticlimax and gloom. A Mass Observation survey in June found that only one in seven Londoners was “happy or elated” by the war’s end, with 40 per cent worried or depressed. “The mood of the country seems to me less revolutionary, less Utopian, even less hopeful, than it was in 1940 or 1942,” Orwell wrote in his latest “London Letter.” He was embarrassed to take Ignazio Silone, visiting from Italy, for lunch in such a bedraggled city until Silone pointed out that it was a considerable improvement on Rome.
In The New Yorker, Mollie Panter-Downes wrote that Britons were coming to terms with the reality of an “enormous economic blitz”: “Almost the only thing that they seem perfectly sure about now is that peace is going to be nearly as hard to survive as the war.” The taste of victory was also soured by the implications of the two atomic bombs that the US had dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “In England, as elsewhere,” wrote Panter-Downes, “the shadow of atomic energy, that enormous potential Frankenstein monster, fell darkly across the victory flags and bunting and chillingly across most hearts.”
Orwell thought that this shocking development made C. S. Lewis’s new novel That Hideous Strength, about an evil cabal of scientists conspiring to enslave the world, “all too topical,” and made H. G. Wells’s final book, the apocalyptically dejected Mind at the End of Its Tether, more credible than it would otherwise have been. “This is not a moment at which one can simply disregard the statement that humanity is doomed,” Orwell wrote in his review. “It quite well may be doomed.”
In a prescient Tribune piece called “You and the Atom Bomb,” Orwell suggested that this was the weapon that might prove Burnham right after all, by locking the US and the USSR (once it developed its own bomb) into a long, paranoid stalemate. He could now picture “the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a State which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbours.” The minor nuclear exchange in the background of Nineteen Eighty-Four is much less convincing than Orwell’s suggestion, two years later, “that the fear inspired by the atomic bomb and other weapons yet to come will be so great that everyone will refrain from using them.” Having invented the phrase “cold war,” he also anticipated the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.
Amid the post-war malaise, Orwell’s friends thought he looked even more gaunt and run down than usual. He desperately needed a change. For five years he had dreamed of squirreling himself away on a Hebridean island. The well-connected David Astor recommended Jura in the Inner Hebrides, where he owned property. Robin Fletcher, the laird of Jura, and his wife, Margaret, held a remote farmhouse, Barnhill, that needed a tenant to save it from ruin. Orwell had put in motion plans to move there while Eileen was still alive. That September, he made the long journey n
orth alone and spent his first two weeks in the house where he would write Nineteen Eighty-Four.
CHAPTER 8
Every Book Is a Failure
Orwell 1946–1948
To mark the paper was the decisive act.
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Orwell once said that Nineteen Eighty-Four “wouldn’t have been so gloomy if I had not been so ill.” The evidence suggests otherwise. In the final days of 1945, Tribune readers were confronted with a dispiriting article called “Old George’s Almanac.” The title was designed to put a semi-comic spin on Orwell’s predictions for 1946, which included economic disaster, resurgent fascism, “civil wars, bomb outrages, public executions, famines, epidemics and religious revivals.” Happy new year! “It may be objected that my forecasts are unduly gloomy,” he concluded. “But are they? I fancy it will turn out that I have been over-optimistic rather than the contrary.” Walking away from a lunch with Orwell around this time, the poet and critic Herbert Read, no Pollyanna himself, exclaimed, “My God, Orwell is a gloomy bird!”
The Ministry of Truth Page 18