Page 7 - Animal Farm and 1984

he chose this unpropitious moment to write a deadly satire on the illusion of Soviet Communism. The original manuscript had to be dug out, in a somewhat scorched and crumpled state, from the ruins of Orwell’s blitzed North London home. In this condition, it was sent to T. S. Eliot, the author of The Waste Land, who occupied the extremely influential position of editor at Faber and Faber. Eliot was a political and cultural conservative of the determined Right, and might have been presumed sympathetic to an anti- Stalinist project. But he turned the book down in a letter of extreme condescension which described it as “generally Trotskyite.”
This was, bizarrely enough, the same objection that had been made by Orwell’s leftist opponents. A senior official in the British Ministry of Information named Peter Smollett made it his business to warn publishers against accepting the book. His ostensible rationale was that Josef Stalin was an ally of Great Britain, and that it would be tactless to publish a satire upon him. The likelihood that the Red Army would have stopped fighting Hitler in 1944 for this reason was clearly not very great, but conformist and loyalist opinion is always easy to elicit and the evidence that publisher Jonathan Cape, for example, dropped the book on Smollett’s instigation is very strong. (Smollett himself was later exposed as an agent of the Soviet secret intelligence, whose job was to defend the prestige of Stalinism rather than to support the war effort.)
Other publishers like Victor Gollancz—a leftist sympathiser who had printed earlier Orwell works—needed no persuasion in denying him an audience for the twentieth century’s most successful satire. In the end, the small house of Secker and Warburg agreed to publish Animal Farm in a very small edition, for an advance of forty-five English pounds (or $2,020 expressed in today’s value).
However, a group of Ukrainian socialists, living in refugee camps in post- war Europe, got hold of a copy of the book and immediately understood its profound relevance. They contacted Orwell, who agreed to write the only introduction to Animal Farm that he ever composed, and who gave them the right to reprint the work in the Ukrainian language, for free. This edition was distributed among refugees in Germany, but most copies were seized by the American military authorities (this, well after the war against Hitler was over) and handed over to the Red Army to be burned.
In the United States, the book fared somewhat better. Though it was originally refused by the Dial Press on the absurd grounds that animal stories
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