George Orwell: A Life in Letters (52 page)

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 $37,5
00. 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 César. 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 1
946

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 Martin
⁴
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 Ward
¹
and Tom Hopkinson
²
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 Negrín
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 Negrín’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.