TS Eliot's letter to George Orwell
Rejection letter from Faber and Faber to publish Orwell's Animal Farm
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“Dear Orwell
I know that you wanted a quick decision about ‘Animal Farm’: but the minimum is two directors’ opinions, and that can’t be done under a week. But for the importance of speed, I should have asked the Chairman to look at it as well. But the other director is in agreement with me on the main points. 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.
On the other hand, we have no conviction (and I am sure none of the other directors would have) that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time. It is certainly the duty of any publishing firm which pretends to other interests and motives than mere commercial prosperity, to publish books which go against the current of the moment: but in each instance that demands that at least one member of the firm should have the conviction that this is the thing that needs saying at the moment. I can’t see any reason of prudence or caution to prevent anybody from publishing this book – if he believed in what it stands for.
Now 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. I think you split your vote, without getting any compensating stronger adhesion from either party – i.e. those who criticise Russian tendencies from the point of view of a purer communism, and those who, from a very different point of view, are alarmed about the future of small nations. 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.
I am very sorry, because whoever publishes this, will naturally have the opportunity of publishing your future work: and I have a regard for your work, because it is good writing of fundamental integrity.
Miss Sheldon will be sending you the script under separate cover.”
Source of the letter:
Book: Written in History - Letters that changed the world by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Original : Estate of TS Eliot under Copyright by Faber and Faber Ltd.
Context:
Orwell was famously anti- Stalin and the background of global politics at that time is important to understand the reasoning behind this rejection. Stalin was the west’s greatest ally against Hitler while Orwell on the other hand was more sympathetic towards Stalin’s rival, Trotsky. Eliott as the editor of publisher Faber and Faber made one of the biggest mistakes in publishing history by rejecting this book, as it became of the most definitive books on Soviet era politics and democratise socialism as written by Orwell.
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