Notable & Quotable: Rejecting ‘Animal Farm’

Wall Street Journal

‘What was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.’

ENLARGE

T.S. Eliot in 1944. PHOTO: THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

June 7, 2016 6:29 p.m. ET

From the Guardian (U.K.) online, “ ‘It needs more public-spirited pigs’: TS Eliot’s rejection of Orwell’s Animal Farm,” May 26:

Addressing the author as “Dear Orwell”, Eliot, then a director at publishing firm Faber & Faber, writes on 13 July 1944 that the publisher will not be acquiring Animal Farm for publication. Eliot described its strengths: “We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skilfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane—and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver.”

“I think my own dissatisfaction with this apologue is that the effect is simply one of negation. It ought to excite some sympathy with what the author wants, as well as sympathy with his objections to something: and the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing,” wrote Eliot to Orwell. “And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”