Let me preface this by saying that I am a great admirer of T.S. Eliot, who has to be considered one of the best, if not the best, poet writing in the English language in the 20th century. His writings on culture and Christianity have been important in my thinking about these matters, his inclusion in Kirk’s The Conservative Mind had an important role as well, and I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that his oft-quoted remark about there being no such thing as lost causes has had more influence on how I think than just about any other single aphorism. So I was a little surprised to read the report (via Alan Jacobs) that Eliot had, as an editor at Faber & Faber, rejected Orwell’s Animal Farm in 1944.

It was not that he rejected the novel that surprised me or concerned me so much as the reasons he reportedly gave. As Jacobs notes, the reasons are entirely political and seem to be dictated to an embarrassing degree by the British and American alliance with the Soviet Union. Personally, I have never been overwhelmed by the quality of Animal Farm, having first read it when I was in elementary school and perhaps not able to appreciate it fully thereafter, but if one had to turn it down I would think that describing it as an “anti-Russian novel” informed by a “Trotskyite” political view would be one of the last things one would ever say about it. It is not an anti-Russian novel, or to be precise one could only call it that if you accepted that being Russian and being a Soviet communist were necessarily the same thing, which is an idea that Solzhenitsyn would later ridicule with great vehemence. If I recall correctly, Russians have nothing to do with the story, and indeed I would hazard a guess that setting an anti-communist or more specifically anti-Soviet communist story in an entirely un-Soviet setting was intended to distinguish between the destructive ideology being critiqued and any particular nation. It is Trotskyite mainly in the sense that anyone on the left writing against Stalin’s butchery and evil would probably have been denounced as a Trotskyite by the Soviets.

Would Animal Farm have offended the Soviets? I assume that it would have to have been offensive to them and was offensive, but why should a publishing house in the West care about that? What a telling and sad statement about the power of wartime political correctness that even a mind such as Eliot’s, which obviously had zero sympathy for the system being attacked in the novel, could reach the conclusion that he was not convinced that “this is the thing that needs saying at the moment.” When would have been appropriate? When the Allies were no longer at war with Eastasia and were once again opposed to Eurasia? Ahem. Presumably, as in most historical films today, what was needed was a reliable, easily vilified Nazi pig dictatorship in which the chickens and cows were subjected as ‘racial’ inferiors.