The Books: Arguably, ‘On Animal Farm’, by Christopher Hitchens

On the essays shelf:

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens wrote an entire book on Orwell called Why Orwell Matters (it’s great, no surprise). His mentions of Orwell in print probably run into the hundreds of thousands. And not just the books, the novels and war reportage books, but all of the essays as well. I imagine if you are not familiar with Orwell, or if you only know Animal Farm and 1984, some of Hitchens’ commentary would be too complex, too shorthand-ish, to ever understand. Orwell died pretty young, and he wrote like he knew he wouldn’t be here long. His essays are high watermarks of the form, both personal (shooting the elephant, boarding school days) and political, sometimes at the same time. He has written some political essays that are so masterful they have yet to be matched. He is one of those figures that come along rarely, a figure who can see above and beyond his own time. What is incredible about him is that he was also fully immersed in his own time. He didn’t sit in a tower, observing from afar. He fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was, how you say, highly involved. But that’s the case with other similar figures – Arthur Koestler, Rebecca West.

The following essay by Hitchens was an introduction written for a new edition of Animal Farm.

The essay is broken up into three parts. One is the “Historical Background” of the novel, the “fairy story,” as Orwell termed it. It’s a damn near perfect allegory of the Russian Revolution, and yet it remains broad enough that it speaks to other revolutions, other oppressed peoples, it speaks to the totalitarian mindset in general. But for students of the Russian Revolution, it’s amazingly accurate (although, as Hitchens points out, there is no “Lenin pig.” Fascinating.) Also, you just have to consider the fact that Animal Farm was written at a time when the news coming out of Russia was not just unreliable, but flat-out inaccurate. You had to sift through the record looking for the real truth, you had to read the samizdat literature, which started coming out almost immediately. And Orwell, working with that defect, still understood all. The second part of the essay is the “Story of Publication.” Publishers did not want to touch the manuscript, sometimes because they understood the allegory and were frightened to put their name on such a thing (not to mention the fact that Russia was an ally of Great Britain at that time), and sometimes because they didn’t understand the allegory at all and were like, “Talking animals? We’re not interested in children’s books.” It also was sometimes rejected because certain editors who received the manuscript thought Stalin was a good guy, Communism was awesome, and they wouldn’t put into print such inflammatory stuff that hurt their cause.

You know. Your basic charlatans.

Finally, a small publisher was brave enough to put out a tiny edition. Orwell was paid forty-five pounds. The book, to put it mildly, did not make a splash.

Until …

And that’ll be the excerpt I post today. How the book was “discovered.”

The final section of Hitchens’ beautiful essay has to do with the “afterlife” of Animal Farm, and how it continues to be a revelation to those who live in dictatorships. There’s a reason the book is banned in Iran. It’s never been published in China, Burma, or North Korea. (Hitchens relates a quote from a citizen of Burma: “George Orwell wrote three books about our country: Burmese Days, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.“)

But here is Hitchens on what happened after Animal Farm was published.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘On Animal Farm‘, by Christopher Hitchens

It is thinkable that the story could have ended in this damp-squib way, but two later developments were to give the novel its place in history. A group of Ukrainian and Polish socialists, living in refugee camps in post-war Europe, discovered a copy of the book in English and found it to be a near-perfect allegory of their own recent experience. Their self-taught English-speaking leader and translator, Ihor Ševčenko, found an address for Orwell and wrote to him asking permission to translate Animal Farm into Ukrainian. He told him that many of Stalin’s victims nonetheless still considered themselves to be socialists, and did not trust an intellectual of the Right to voice their feelings. “They were profoundly affected by such scenes as that of animals singing ‘Beasts of England’ on the hill … They very vividly reacted to the ‘absolute’ values of the book.” Orwell agreed to grand publication rights for free (he did this for subsequent editions in several other Eastern European languages) and to contribute the preface from which I quoted earlier. It is affecting to imagine battle-hardened ex-soldiers and prisoners of war, having survived all the privations of the Eastern Front, becoming stirred by the image of British farm animals singing their own version of the discarded “Internationale,” but this was an early instance of the hold the book was to take on its readership. The emotions of the American military authorities in Europe were not so easily touched: They rounded up all the copies of Animal Farm that they could find and turned them over to the Red Army to be burned. The alliance between the farmers and the pigs, so hauntingly described in the final pages of the novel, was still in force.

But in the part-acrimonious closing scene, usually best-remembered for the way in which men and pigs have become indistinguishable, Orwell predicted, as on other occasions, that the ostensible friendship between East and West would not long outlast the defeat of Nazism. The Cold War, a phrase that Orwell himself was the first to use in print^*, soon created a very different ideological atmosphere This in turn conditioned the reception of Animal Farm in the United States. At first rejected at Random House by the Communist sympathizer Angus Cameron (who had been sent the book by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.) and then by a succession of lesser publishers, it was rescued from oblivion by Frank Morley of Harcourt, Brace, who while visiting England had been impressed by a chance encounter with the novel in a bookshop in Cambridge. Publication was attended by two strokes of good fortune: Edmund Wilson wrote a highly favorable review for the New Yorker comparing Orwell’s satirical talent to the work of Swift and Voltaire, and the Book-of-the-Month Club made it a main selection, which led to a printing of almost half a million copies. The stupidity of The Dial Press notwithstanding, the Walt Disney company came up with a proposal for the film version. This was never made, though the CIA did later produce and distribute an Animal Farm cartoon for propaganda purposes. By the time Orwell died in January 1950, having just succeeded in finishing Nineteen Eighty-four, he had at last achieved an international reputation and was having to issue repeated disclaimers of the use made of his work by the American right-wing.

^* In an especially acute feuilleton entitled “You and the Atomic Bomb” in Tribune in October 1945.