The Never End: The Other Orwell, The Cold War, The CIA, MI6, And The Origin Of Animal Farm [1 ed.] 9819907640, 9789819907649, 9819907659, 9789819907656, 9789819907670

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
About the Author
List of Illustrations
The Never End
2013: Animal Farm Timeline
Timeline to This Timeline
1879/1880
1917
1934
1936?
1939
1941
1944
1945
1945
1945/1946
1946
1947–1960
1948
1949
1949
1950
1950
1951
1951
1954
1956
1965–1974
1996
2002
2007–?
2013: George Orwell’s “Freedom of the Press,” a Proposed Preface to Animal Farm, Expurgated and Footnoted (with a Bias)
Notes
2015: Revisionist History: The Origin of Animal Farm (Was a Little-Known Story, “Animal Riot,” by Russian/Ukrainian Scholar Nikolai Kostomarov)
2003: Saint George and the Damn Truth
2003: The Anti-Matter of George Orwell
2003: A Modest Disposal: Jail All Living Artists. Elvis Stays
Note
2011: The Politics of Narrative
2016: Pigs, Goats, Tea Parties, Walking Magnets and Scotch Central: John Reed with Bretty Rawson
Note
2016: Life in Interesting Times/What Orwell Can (and Can’t) Teach Us: Jordan Rothacker in Conversation with John Reed on Fascism and the Neo-Liberal Oligarchy
1879, 1917, 2015: “Animal Riot: Letter from a Little Russian Landowner to His Friend in St. Petersburg”
2022: The War of Passive Aggression: Orwell’s (Yes, “Orwellian”) Forever Cold War, and Now China
Index

Citation preview

The Never End The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the Origin of Animal Farm John Reed

The Never End “A pig returns to the farm, thumbing his snout at Orwell ... the world had a new evil to deal with, and it was not communism.” —The New York Times “Snowball’s Chance parodies Orwell’s Animal Farm, dragging it kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.” —Publisher’s Weekly “Reed’s tale, crafted amid Ground Zero’s dust, is chilling in its clarity and inspired in its skewering of Orwell’s stilted style. Whether you liked or loathed the original, there’s no denying Reed has captured the state of the farm today.” —The Fort Myers News-Press “Reed has managed to take a dated masterpiece ... and revive it for the odd, casinolike social and political world we’re mired in today; in the process he’s created his own masterpiece.” —Creative Loafing, Charlotte “Orwell’s sacred pigs get a proper roast.” —The Portland Tribune “Fearless, provocative, and both reverent and irreverent at the same time.” —WordRiot “Some books double as a matchstick: if struck in the right conditions, they can cause a wildfire.” —The Rumpus “Reed has brought music’s remix culture to literature with stunning results.” —largeheartedboy “Reed skewers our early twenty-first century (edgy, tragic, absurd) with a marvelously precise wit.” —Locus Magazine “Snowball’s gambit is to turn the farm into a giant spectacle of happiness, and his Animal Fair represents more than just a place: it names an entire ethos.” —Guernica “One of the keenest thinkers of our time.” —PopMatters

“A brilliant and challenging tour de force. Which could be said about every book of his.” —Michael Lally “John Reed has been writing hard-to-classify books for over a decade, to great acclaim and sometimes greater notoriety.” —Bomb Magazine “This book has something to upset almost everyone who reads it, just like a good book should.” —Dennis Loy Johnson

John Reed

The Never End The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the Origin of Animal Farm

John Reed The New School University New York, NY, USA

ISBN 978-981-99-0764-9 ISBN 978-981-99-0765-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Acknowledgments

I’ve had a great deal of help on this project. To begin, thanks to Anna Fridlis, who was with me for much of the two-year chasedown of “Animal Riot,” by Nikolai Kostomarov. Profound thanks, as well, to Tanya Paperny, who translated the text of “Animal Riot,” and granted that it be included here. In preparing this collection—checking against publications, expanding, cleaning up, footnoting—I’m grateful to early contributions from Kyle Wu, major contributions from Natalie Cruz, heroic contributions from Lisette Boer, and last-hour contributions from Eliza Reed. Thanks as well to Bretty Rawson and Jordan Rothacker for initiating the two included conversations, and also to Daniel Levin Becker for his indefatigable work toward The Believer’s publication of my expurgated and footnoted version of “Freedom of the Press.” Snowball’s Chance,1 which started me out on this journey, would not have been possible without James Sherry and Deborah Thomas of Roof Books, Alexis Hurley and Kim Witherspoon of Inkwell Management, Ryan Harbage of The Fischer-Harbage Agency, Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House Books, John Strausbaugh of The New York Press, Dinitia Smith of The New York Times, and PEN America for its army of lawyers. Also, a debt of thanks is due to Nicholas Birns for his scholarship and Jacob Dreyer for his erudition and belief. Thanks also to Yeardley Leonard, Eliza Reed, and Cassius Reed, for their willingness to accompany me on this exhilarating and occasionally absurd adventure. And thank you to my colleagues in Creative Writing at The New School University for their friendship, wisdom, and humanity, and The New School University for its research support.

1

Snowball’s Chance. Roof Books, 2002.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks, as well, to the editors, publishers, and dedicated literary people who worked with me toward the completion of these essays, which were originally (print and online) published in: The Paris Review MobyLives/Melville House Publishing Harper’s Magazine The Rumpus Literary Hub The New York Press The Brooklyn Rail The Believer PANK Magazine

Contents

The Never End

1

2013: Animal Farm Timeline

15

2013: George Orwell’s “Freedom of the Press,” a Proposed Preface to Animal Farm, Expurgated and Footnoted (with a Bias)

63

2015: Revisionist History: The Origin of Animal Farm (Was a Little-Known Story, “Animal Riot,” by Russian/Ukrainian Scholar Nikolai Kostomarov)

77

2003: Saint George and the Damn Truth

103

2003: The Anti-Matter of George Orwell

107

2003: A Modest Disposal: Jail All Living Artists. Elvis Stays

113

2011: The Politics of Narrative

121

2016: Pigs, Goats, Tea Parties, Walking Magnets and Scotch Central: John Reed with Bretty Rawson

133

2016: Life in Interesting Times/What Orwell Can (and Can’t) Teach Us: Jordan Rothacker in Conversation with John Reed on Fascism and the Neo-Liberal Oligarchy

147

1879, 1917, 2015: “Animal Riot: Letter from a Little Russian Landowner to His Friend in St. Petersburg” By Nikolai Kostomarov, Translated by Tanya Paperny

153

2022: The War of Passive Aggression: Orwell’s (Yes, “Orwellian”) Forever Cold War, and Now China

171

Index

181

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About the Author

John Reed is the author of A Still Small Voice; The Whole; the SPD bestseller, Snowball’s Chance; All The World’s A Grave: A New Play By William Shakespeare; Tales of Woe; Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love Poems; A Drama In Time: The New School Century; and The Family Dolls: A Manson Paper + Play Book. He’s contributed to, among other venues: Guernica, ElectricLit, The Brooklyn Rail, Tin House, Paper Magazine, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Bomb Magazine, Art in America, The Los Angeles Times, The Believer, The Rumpus, Observer, PEN Poetry Series, The Daily Beast, Gawker, Slate, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, Vice, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and Rolling Stone, and he’s been anthologized in (selected) Best American Essays. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and is an associate professor and the current director of the MFA in Creative Writing at The New School University.

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List of Illustrations

Sid Pig The second tower Nikolai Kostomarov, stamp of Ukraine, 1992 Horns & hooves Mykhailo Hrushevsky on Ukrainian banknote George & Eileen on the Aragon Front at Huesca, 1937 Hitler and Stalin T.S. Eliot Arthur, Mamaine (Celia’s twin sister), Robie and Flannery, 1947 Ants From the painting ‘Nikolai Kostomarov in his coffin’ by Ilya Repin Polemic, no. 2, with essays by Orwell and Russell New York State pamphlet, You and the Atomic Bomb, 1950 Panel from the IRD cartoon version of Animal Farm Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism! Educational Comic Book (Catechetical Guild) 1947 Still from the film of Animal Farm (Halas & Batchelor) 1955 Sonia Brownell in 1949 Sonia Orwell in New York Trotskyite with big feet Hitch Turn of century Shitty Mickey Eric Blair of the Imperial Indian Police

xii 14 17 19 21 23 25 27 29 31 34 36 38 40 43 45 47 49 54 58 60 112 170

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God save the Queen The fascist regime

They made you a moron Potential H-bomb

God save the Queen She ain’t no human being 1

The Sex Pistols. 1977. I was a kid, but I might have heard the song around then. They made it to the States at the end of the year, and I was a downtown creature, from downtown creatures. My mother was singing at the Mudd Club.2 There’s a black ribbon bash in history perplexing you and vexing me Come on, it’s stacked up to be the best party in town 1

“God Save the Queen.” Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols. Virgin, A&M, 1977. 2 A nightclub located at 77 White Street in Tribeca, open from 1978–1983. Lyrics from a poem by the singer, artist Judy Rifka: originally published in a chapbook of poems and illustrations by Rifka, Cheap Today, which was edited by Judith Doyle and published by her press, Rumour Publications (Toronto, 1979).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Reed, The Never End, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_1

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Meltdown to the Black Ribbon Bash Meltdown to the other side of town

Whenever it happened exactly, I remember the impact of The Sex Pistols. They were crude, unmusical, doomed—but they were right. The Queen was inhuman. 2022. I’m pulling the essays together for this publication: the Queen dies. I have all kinds of thrilling delusions about the end of the global monarchy. Too bad. Anyhoo, it’s about time. As it is for George Orwell. The writing here spans twenty years; some of my early essays strike me as screechy, high-pitched in their rage. Revise? Expel? As I mulled over what to compile and what to exclude, I remembered the tone of the early 00s; when I said Orwell wasn’t the benevolent white savior that we’d made him out to be; that he’d been complicit with the CIA, etc., and that, however intentionally, a campaign against revolution, and for that matter political change, had originated in the farm animals, or, “the proletariat,” as Orwell might have identified them in his youth. I had the evidence—in overwhelming plenty. Orwell’s collaborations with the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the British Secret Service, and what was to become MI6— all that was already known. Animal Farm’s massive distribution as front-line, Western propaganda in the Cold War. And Orwell’s lists. And I had the motivation. 9/11. The skyline of my childhood. Just down from where I lived on Lafayette Street in 2001. And an out-the-window view from PS41, where I read Animal Farm over and over again, second through fifth grade, and was pummeled with the message: all revolutions are destined to fail; we’re just too greedy and dumb; we will always be our own worst enemy. True? An appeal to torpor? Maybe, maybe. But a tool, regardless, to quash the radical impulse, to instruct would-be reformers—in the case of Animal Farm, literally the youth of the world—in the philosophy of political and cultural resignation, and conformity. Saying that in 2002 roused hysteria. Orwell was a great man: the great common man; the great voice of reason; the great torch bearer of truth. Ad infinitum. And my early essays are tormented, in response, fevered and panting,3 shouting up to people atop a wall who are shouting down, with bullhorns. Shortly after Snowball’s Chance 4 came out, 2002, I walked the block and a half to Cooper Union to listen to Christopher Hitchens talk about Orwell. His recent book, Why Orwell Matters ,5 was a whitewash of Orwell (the

3 Alex Cockburn, who wrote the introduction to the first edition of Snowball’s Chance, also evidenced this hysteria in the Orwell discussion of the 00s. 4

Roof Books.

5

Also Orwell’s Victory. Basic Books, 2008.

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blacklists/enemy lists that Orwell wrote and handed over to the Information Research Department were the literary scandal of the moment), and a reframing of the Cold War, which was a term Orwell coined, or at the very least popularized. Orwell’s “Cold War” was with Russia, China, and communism in general. The new Cold War, Hitchens’ Cold War, was with the Islamic world. The Orwell estate had threatened to sue, I guess, me and my publisher, on the grounds that Snowball’s Chance wasn’t a parody, and the book had gotten a splashy press reception as a result (albeit via a small publishing house—the threats of the Orwell estates, in terms of normative distribution, had worked). On stage, Hitchens said something scornful about me—that I was named for the John Reed who wrote The Ten Days that Shook the World—and during questions, I introduced myself from the audience, to a collective gasp, and engaged him from there.6 After the event, in our interaction, Hitchens was polite, affable. We spoke together, and one after the other to Rachel Donadio, then of a conservative local New York City newspaper, where she published a sectarian bit of coverage7 that I was nonetheless grateful for. Hitchens, after our individual chats with Donadio, promised me a steak and a bottle of Irish whiskey; he reiterated those promises when I “debated” him on the BBC . My mic kept going off. (I would have a chance to redeem myself on another BBC program.8 ) Over the years, I’d see Hitchens around, but he had the poor etiquette to die before he handed over my bottle of Ardbeg. Some of Orwell’s magic rubbed off on Hitchens; to this day he is revered. Personally, I liked him, and I liked talking to him, even if he was a drunk rambler and his later successes as a pundit stemmed primarily from his ability to make no sense whatsoever. In talking to me that first time on the BBC , for example, he kept implying I was making a point about a walking stick; Orwell had or hadn’t hit someone with a walking stick? Or something? A reference to some ancient spat I couldn’t care less about. Nevertheless, from that interview on, I was in. Hitchens called me a “Bin Ladenist,” haha, and that would become my casting call: rabid leftist. I didn’t really fit, of course,9 and my critique of Orwell’s collaboration was more perfunctorily factual than anything else; Hitchens and his teammates were apologists, and their attempts to recast the Cold War in terms of Islamism were strained and frail.

6

I was probably named for my great uncle, John August Reed, a prominent architect of California modernism—but I wouldn’t be surprised if the literary John Reed figured in. 7 [Title unknown]. The New York Sun, November 7, 2002. “Snowball’s Chance is premised on the belief that Orwell’s Allegory was a piece of Cold War Agitprop.” 8 9

BBC Radio: November 27, Today Show; November 28, World News Report.

I’ve been told there’s a Chinese proverb: “do not name the well from which you do not wish to drink.”

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Their argument, if not exactly indisputable, was also not exactly new; I’d first heard the inklings of their points in the 70s, when I was back in PS41 in fourth grade, being asked to interpret the Iran Hostage Crisis re: Animal Farm. The teacher would bring out Animal Farm and apply it readily to any revolution (Iran, China, whatever)—with a fatalism that was part patriotism, and part capitulation: the pigs were of another cast. That any wrong, intellectual or personal, could be ascribed to George Orwell was heresy. Cut back to Cooper Union, 2002: mealy white men with greasy hair scolded me from seated rows on all sides. What I was saying, in Snowball’s Chance, was an affront to the integrity of contrarians everywhere (who, despite their avowed independence, parroted Orwell endlessly). In picking up the subject of Animal Farm, I had inadvertently questioned the legitimacy of Hitchens’ own turn to the right (which was the wellspring of his newfound popularity). Much as Orwell’s later life success had been delineated by his collaboration with a far-right agenda, so was the case for Hitchens. And in fact, the rightest turn of the elder white man would be paradigmatic of the coming century: politics over facts, history, or reason. Looking back at two of my early essays, collected here, one can map the trajectory: Orwell’s defenders always look to contextualize Orwell’s shortcomings in a historic moment. Whatever his infraction, he was a victim of circumstance— times were different then, and, for example, Hitler was looking really good for a minute there. Orwell never meant that his books should be employed to stultify schoolchildren. And yet that’s what Animal Farm is—an educational missile aimed at any healthy impulse toward reform. The argument that Animal Farm is a generalized indictment of totalitarianism is simply unsupportable by the text or any existing presentation of the text. Rather, the intelligence of the pigs as opposed to the stupidity of the other animals, and the ultimate hopelessness of revolution, renders Animal Farm a de facto endorsement of the status quo.10 Demonstrating a consistent lack of aptitude for “the power of facing,” Hitchens just dismisses the work of anyone he disagrees with. Salmon Rushdie, Edward Said, Martin Amis, etcetera—all wrong, foolish or deceitful. Hitchens’ rule is, if it’s minor, concede it, if it’s major, say it’s minor. In his hiccup of a chapter discussing the most disputed issue of the Orwell legacy, Hitchens poohpoohs the list of 135 names that Orwell wrote up in the capacity of an informer for the “Information Research Department” (of the British Secret Service). To Hitchens, Orwell didn’t mean any harm, and probably didn’t do any harm, and the thirty-five names not yet released by the British government don’t indicate an obfuscation of something untoward, such as a “blacklist,” but rather, the “inanity of British officialdom.” Of the list that has been released, Orwell’s bluntly racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic asides are similarly submitted to Hitchens’ power of sidestepping. … Regardless of whether or not Orwell did make, or would have made, or would have recanted a turn to the right, Orwell, to Hitchens, is little more than self-justification. As much as Hitchens models 10 “Saint George and the Damn Truth.” MobyLives /Melville House Publishing, November 10, 2003.

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himself on Orwell, one can’t dispel a notion that Orwell probably wouldn’t have liked Hitchens, either. Employing Orwell to bludgeon dissent, Christopher Hitchens has firmly positioned himself among the legions of “smelly little orthodoxies” that Orwell considered “a pox on the twentieth century.”11

I wonder now about the shrillness of my delivery; my reluctance was showing. But if Orwell esoterica wasn’t my foremost interest, I eventually realized that, in part, it was my calling. In the fashion of writer as hero, so principal to the mythos of George Orwell and his imitators and acolytes, I would fashion myself a reluctant hero, a lone-wolf voice, a man of ethics standing alone in a storm of hypocrisy—but with two decades of Orwell, my youthful fervor, my readiness to take up this cause, was overcome by dissociated resolve. It seemed I was the one. When the pandemic began, I would go out each night to play my trumpet on the back porch of the old house where we were staying. With the very old house came a very old tree, which overhung the porch, and listened to me noodling in the blues scale. On an evening a few weeks into this, the tree looked down at me, as it might to one of its many squirrels, and said, “Thank you for playing the trumpet for me.” And I said, “I’m not playing for you— I’m just practicing, on the porch.” And the tree said to me, “Thank you for playing the trumpet for me.” I’m not frothing at the mouth over Orwell. I have my own history with Animal Farm from US public school (not at all like the UK public school—Hitchens made that mistake when we interacted) but I’m not terribly interested in the bickering of Orwell and his generation; I’m much more interested in the creative paradigm. The bickering is little more than the forced (toxic) masculinity that Orwell practiced.12 Alas, I’m probably also guilty of it; I often remember how Christopher Hitchens apologized to me at Cooper Union. He had struck “below the belt” he said, in claiming I was named for the communist author of The Ten Days that Shook the World. It’s easy for me, in all this, to feel self-critical and humiliated; I was right, and history has borne

11 “The Anti-Matter of George Orwell.” The Brooklyn Rail , April–May 2003. A version of this piece is included in this collection. 12 Elisaveta Fen (Lydia Jackson/née Lidiia Vitalevna Zhiburtovich), in her memoir, A Russian’s England (Paul Gordon Books, 1976), cited Orwell’s gender performance in relation to a plaintive semi love letter he penned to her on March 1, 1939. “I wonder who your young man is now?” wrote Orwell, “I have thought of you so often—have you thought about me, I wonder? I know it’s indiscreet to write such things in letters, but you’ll be clever & burn this, won’t you?” Fen, a once roommate of Orwell’s first wife, Eileen, always denied that her rumored affair with Orwell was anything more than a kiss, and recalled that her reaction to the letter was little less than repulsed: “I was looking forward to seeing Eileen again, but not George, especially as the tone of his letter suggested a renewal of the amorous behavior I had been too softhearted to repel. … I had several men friends at the time whom I found more attractive than George, and his masculine conceit annoyed me.”

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that out, but why did I have to be so peevish about it?13 I suppose it was a manifestation of my own insecurities in the face of a seemingly all-powerful enemy. And it was the moment itself—the temperature, the direction of the wind, the screaming conversation passing in years. Copyright, propaganda, the never-ending war, not until I worked on All the World’s a Grave 14 was I less petulant about it all. The idea was to write an answer to Henry V , the greatest recruitment play of all time, by piecing together, with Shakespeare’s own language, an anti-war tragedy.15 The surviving press copy reads: What it is: the known works of W.S., reconstructed, line by line, into a new tragedy, starring Hamlet, Juliet & Romeo, Iago, Macbeth, The Queen, Three Weird Sisters, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, and the Ghost of the King. The story: Hamlet goes to war for Juliet, the daughter of King Lear. Having captured his bride—by unnecessary bloodshed—Prince Hamlet returns home to find that his mother has murdered his father and married Macbeth. Hamlet, wounded and reeling, is sought out by the ghost of his murdered further, and commanded to seek revenge. Iago, opportunistic, further inflames the enraged Prince, persuading him that Juliet is having an affair with Romeo; the Prince goes mad with jealousy. The issues engendered: war; parody; sex and exploitation; the current Shakespeare fracas (was Shakespeare really Shakespeare, and what is authorship?); the long history of Shakespeare adaptations; Shakespeare and Hollywood; the public domain; the literary canon; the state of contemporary letters in relation to “great” works; and the creative future we bequeath our children.

Somewhat more confident with the subject matter, I wrote, in an “Outro,” about my aspirations and the innerscape of my beliefs: My first love was literature: even the love of loving literature was achingly seductive. Fahrenheit 451: the end-time of a world without books. Portrait of the Artist (and derivatives): the heroism of the written act itself. In college, I spent three days in bed, reading Moby Dick, and, by the end, had a respectable whale imitation going. But for all that love, and the life I’ve given to books, if I could make one enduring contribution, it would be to assist in the end of literature as we know it. The shelf space is hoarded by mediocre classics, and we have hobbled our culture, and our creative culture, with received wisdoms. Where are today’s Dostoevskys? Where are today’s Virginia Wolfs? To ask is to confess an absence of engagement with contemporary letters. Those books are out there, many of them, languishing. …

13 For example, my 2003 satirical pieces, A Modest Disposal and Shitty Mickey, are included in this collection. 14 15

Penguin Books/Plume, 2008.

Our first blurb, from Spalding Gray, read: “It’s a shrewd, gutsy remix that brings the conscience of Shakespeare to our troubled times.”

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I’ve been having funny dreams lately. Not too long ago, I dreamt I was in attendance at some kind of sporting event: maybe polo. It was late afternoon, the first cooling off of a hot day. I was part of a standing audience of intellectuals and petty nobility. (I can’t quite put a period to the setting.) One of our party came running out—having just been received by a royal audience—and he reported gleefully, in staccato barks, that the Queen had given him a poop. One of her poops. He held a clear plastic carry case (which, by the way, was identical to the case we use to contain my daughter’s pet lizards when we’re cleaning the aquarium). It had two lean, firm dark turds in it; one lay partly atop the other, not-quite perpendicular. Everyone mocked the bearer of the turds—mercilessly. He took his teasing in good humor, as it was meant. Then the crowd went silent, breath held, as he slowly lifted the case up to his nose, to sniff the Queen’s poop. His expression was one of enormous concentration. He sniffed like a connoisseur of wine—committing the sensory experience to memory. Then, the crowd still silent, he passed the plastic tub to the person beside him: with a similar sense of purpose, this person, too, sniffed the poop. And then— the silence settling in like reverence—the tub was passed from one set of hands to the next. The tub was passed gently, like an urn of ashes. And everyone lifted it to their nose, and sniffed it.16

Publishing, reading, revisiting Orwell over the next ten years, the tenor of the discussion didn’t change markedly; when I returned more determinedly for the ten-year anniversary edition of the Snowball (Melville House, 2012), I had various ideas about new essays: among them, the Animal Farm/CIA timeline and the origins of Animal Farm essays I would later publish.17 But there were other essays I began work on, essays which I would pick up and put down all the way through the preparation of this collection. There was an initial fortress of Orwell apologia that made attacks quite difficult. Timothy Garton Ash and Christopher Hitchens in The New York Review of Books ; Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The New York Times ; and Louis Menand in The New Yorker. The story told was uniform: a sentimental portrait of a moral man of some failings—a bit of a betraying racist, homophobic sexist— who was quite simply struggling to tell the truth, and most importantly, was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Stalinists with the future of the planet and maybe the universe at stake. The tendered defenses, never advancing literary theses beyond what you would expect from a tenth-grade English assignment, only ranged in spirit: Geoffrey Wheatcroft was the boot-licking lackey, and Christopher Hitchens was the dissembling, purely partisan antihistorian. (Hitchens was prescient in this position; take the election deniers of today as counterpoint.)

16

All the World’s a Grave. Penguin Books/Plume, 2008.

17

Versions of these later publications are included in this collection.

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It was a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Information named Peter Smolka who had quietly helped orchestrate the near suppression of Animal Farm. One might therefore put it like this: in the late 1940s Orwell was fighting for survival as a writer, and also considered the survival of democratic and socialist values to be at stake in the struggle against Stalin. … On March 29, 1949, Orwell received a visit at his hospital bedside from Celia Kirwan, who was among other things an official of the IRD. She was also the sister-in-law of Arthur Koestler, and Orwell had already, in that capacity, met her and proposed marriage to her. They discussed the necessity of recruiting socialist and radical individuals to the fight against the Communists. This subject was already close to Orwell’s heart, as can be seen from the story of his effort to get Animal Farm circulated clandestinely in Eastern Europe. Ms. Kirwan was close to his heart also, and some defenders of Orwell have kindly suggested that this, together with his much-etiolated physical condition, may have led to a moment of weakness.18 It should also be noted that Orwell did not hand the thirty-five names to some faceless bureaucrat. He had known Celia Kirwan since 1945, when they met at Koestler’s house in Wales. Indeed, he had been briefly in love with her (she and her sister Mamaine were celebrated society beauties) and he had even proposed marriage. Although she turned him down, they remained close friends.19 Orwell devoted more attention to propaganda than any British writer of his generation. … In Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell expresses disgust over the fact that propaganda during the Spanish Civil War is being produced by noncombatants sheltered from actual bullets, but within five years Orwell (who did fight against fascism in Spain) [italics by author] was writing propaganda for BBC radio and confiding in his diary, “All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why.” Nietzsche never put it better. Nor did Orwell restrict himself to anti-Nazi propaganda. In August 2003 the Public Record Office in England released a list of the “crypto communists” that Orwell compiled in 1949 for the Information Research Department, a propaganda bureau that operated out of the Foreign Office. The important point for my purposes is not that a leftist would collaborate with the government to root out suspected communists. Although the notion of Orwell as a McCarthyite is alarming, there is no evidence that his handling over the list did anyone any harm.20 Writers are not entirely responsible for their admirers. It is unlikely that Jane Austen, if she were here today, would wish to become a member of the Jane Austen Society. In his lifetime, George Orwell was regarded, even by his friends, as a contrary man. It was said that the closer you got to him the colder and more critical he became. As a writer, he was often hardest on his allies. He was a middle-class intellectual who despised the middle class and was contemptuous 18

Christopher Hitchens. “Orwell’s Lists.” The New York Review of Books , 2002.

19

Hugh Wilford. The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War. Frank Cass Publishers, 2003. 20 Mark Wollaeger. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to 1945. Princeton University Press, 2006.

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of intellectuals, a Socialist whose abuse of Socialists—“all that dreary tribe of high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit juice drinkers who come flocking toward the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat”— was as vicious as any Tory’s. He preached solidarity, but he had the habits of a dropout, and the works for which he is most celebrated, Animal Farm, 1984, and the essay “Politics and the English Language,” were attacks on people who purported to share his political views. He was not looking to make friends. But after his death he suddenly acquired an army of fans—all middle-class intellectuals eager to suggest that a writer who approved of little would have approved of them. … His first wife, Eileen, with whom he adopted a son, died in 1945. He proposed to several women thereafter, sometimes suggesting, as an inducement, that he would probably die soon and leave his widow with a valuable estate; but he struck out. Then, in 1949, when he really was on his deathbed, he married Sonia Brownell, a woman whose sex appeal was widely appreciated. Brownell had slept with Orwell once, in 1945, apparently from the mixed motives of pity and the desire to sleep with famous writers, one of her hobbies. The marriage was performed in a hospital room; Orwell died three months later. He ended up selling more books than any other serious writer of the twentieth century—Animal Farm and 1984 were together translated into more than sixty languages; in 1973, English-language editions of 1984 were still selling at a rate of 1,340 copies a day—and he left all his royalties to Sonia. She squandered them and died more or less in poverty, in 1980. Today, Orwell’s gravesite, in a churchyard in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, is tended by volunteers.21

Bernard Crick, the Orwell biographer par-excellence of the later century, poses his incredibly insightful question, “Why are radicals so eager to give up one of their own?”22 but still, in answer, can’t help but back away from Orwell’s culpability. Orwell’s collaborations were “no different from responsible citizens nowadays passing on information to the anti-terrorist squad about people in their midst whom they believe to be IRA bombers.” Of course, Frances Stoner Saunders, in The Cultural Cold War (The New Press, 1999), demurs: “There is no evidence that anyone on Orwell’s list (as far as has been made public) was involved in any illegal undertaking, and certainly nothing which would justify the comparison to … terrorists. ‘Homosexual’ was the only indictment which bore any risk of criminal conviction, though this does not seem to have deterred Orwell in his bestowal of the word.” As formidable as the fortifications erected around Orwell by The New York Times , The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books , a long siege of such poor argumentation was inevitable. Wollaeger’s assertion in Modernism, Media, and Propaganda that there was “no evidence that his [Orwell’s] handling over the list did anyone any harm” is typical of the bizarre entitlement of the great man edifice. The parallel would be something like this: you 21 22

Louis Menand. “Honest, Decent, Wrong.” The New Yorker, 2003.

“Why Are Radicals so Eager to Give Up One of Their Own?” The Independent , July 14, 1996.

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were party to a stoning, or a firing squad, but claim innocence in that your stone might not have struck its target, or that you took aim, but you might have missed. Menand, for his contribution in “Honest, Decent, Wrong” goes so far as to apologize not only for Orwell but for Orwell’s fanboys: “Writers are not entirely responsible for their admirers.” Menand then proceeds with that sickening characterization of Sonia Bronwell: the gold digger to Orwell as Christ. Nothing but ugly presumption supposes that Bronwell had nefarious designs on Orwell; as of their marriage in 1949, there was still little to indicate Orwell would amount to much—Orwell had enjoyed recent recognition, but any talk of legacy would have been preposterously speculative. She was a writer and she liked him, even though he was contemptible; more confusing things have happened in this life. Through the decade to come, the twenty-tens, the Orwell defense grew more distant, a faint cry. But if the gasconaders shriveled in stature and assurance,23 the lists were set entirely aside. Despite the hefty historical case that had mounted against Orwell, there was as much of a hesitancy to condemn him as there was to commend him.24 In 1949, Orwell wrote, “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” Orwell, who didn’t live to 50, would return to this idea in different forms; in origin, one could point to a 1942 criticism of Orwell written by Derek “Stanley” Savage, a poet and anarchist and prominent critic. What is the actual social system which he is fighting to defend? What hopes has he of diverting the stream of history the way he wants it to go? Brave words and muddled thinking cannot disguise the fact that Mr. Orwell, like all the other supporters of the war, shipping magnates, coal owners, proletarians, university professors, Sunday journalists, Trade Union leaders, Church dignitaries, scoundrels and honest men, is being swept along by history, not directing it. Like them, he will be deposited, along with other detritus, where history decides, not where he thinks.25

In 2013, I began gathering pieces to the puzzle of “Animal Riot” by Nikolai Kostomarov, the story which served as the basis for Animal Farm. As of this writing, making the assertion is effortless, but it would take me two years to scrounge through literary history to find that certainty. With my previous Orwell writings, I’d experienced so much pushback, vitriolic, spiteful, wounded, that I was prepared for what might come—but the response was not what I expected. The literary community just shrugged: so, they seemed

23

Jason Cowley. “After Orwell.” Financial Times , 2013.

24

Catherine Buni. “From Orwell to Trump: When Does Egoism Become Narcissism?” Literary Hub, 2016. 25

This 1942 retort was published in Partisan Review in response to positions taken by Orwell in The “London Letters” series—fifteen articles when the UK waited for invasion by Nazi Germany—also published in Partisan Review.

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to say, this is the basis for Animal Farm. They accepted the footnote, and the accompanying criticism of Orwell. It was news, but not heartbreak. The two other essays that I began work on in 2013, which I revisited for this collection only to cast off yet again: “A Few Names to be remembered with George Orwell,”26 and “Orwell’s Angels (Army).” The former of these working titles refers to an attempt to present a clear view of Orwell’s “lists,” and who he did/didn’t turn over to the British Secret Service. The intention was to organize the information in as concise a manner as possible. It would be a list of lists to end all lists: 1000–2000 words, which I drafted. The problem: despite what I thought was a very sound hypothesis and explanation of the record, I still felt the essay was no more than that—conjecture, however plausible, however likely. I couldn’t write the final word, because ultimately too much of the history was lost, beclouded, or concealed. The second of the aforementioned unwritten essays would endeavor to chronicle the inclination to blame women for Orwell’s wrongs. As indicated by the quotes from the apologists cited a few pages back, there was a seeming unanimity in faulting and shaming Orwell’s female associations: it was never Orwell himself that committed the infraction, his actions were merely consequential of the poor influences of his wives, love interests, and women friends. The essay never found its way into a draft because I couldn’t come up with a form that was appropriate.27 Trading cards? A family tree? How could I mount this criticism without falling prey to it? The last thing I wanted was to perpetuate the mischaracterizations. Maybe I was especially vulnerable to them? Or maybe the mischaracterizations were inextricable from the history as it had been written? The literary record wasn’t just hazy, it was befouled. With the twenty-year anniversary of Snowball, and with my work here, I am confronted in the daily news cycle with the ongoing same-old argument that Orwell should be more applicable than ever: 1984 hit the bestseller list with the election of the US president in 2016; President Trump et al. are an attestation to the dissolve of language and objective truth28 ; China’s domineering political class of state-sponsored pigs, and the total surveillance of its citizens, summons the Big Brother of the Western lesson plan.29 But the corollaries are curiously hollow—perhaps because the West is no longer the West, and we can 26 The unfinished draft of this essay is included in these pages as a footnote in “George Orwell’s ‘Freedom of the Press,’ a Proposed Preface to Animal Farm, expurgated and footnoted (with a bias).” 27 Lisette Boer, who’s been invaluable in preparing these pages, sifted through all the relevant sources—Sonia Brownell to 1984’s Julia—and neatly archived the research for this essay that never took place. 28 Stephen Rohde. “Big Brother Is Watching You: Is America Becoming Orwell’s Nightmare?” Los Angeles Review of Books , 2017; Summer Brennan. “Notes from the Resistance: A Column on Language and Power.” Literary Hub, 2016. 29 Jeffrey Wasserstrom. “Hot Dystopic: Orwell and Huxley at the Shanghai’s World Fair.” Los Angeles Review of Books , 2011; Simon Tisdall. “China v Russia v America: Is 2021 the Year Orwell’s 1984 Comes True?” The Observer, 2021; Ian Williams. “China’s Digital Stasi Sees All from Cyberspace.” The Times , 2022.

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no longer adhere, naive and foolhardy, to the promise of a paradise brought on by capitalism and scientific enlightenment. That particular tomorrow will never dawn. For decades, America gave China a vision of future prosperity. But today, America has mostly ceased to offer a model for China or anywhere else. … The America that inspired China to change in its own image has become a baneful indication of what not to do, a monument to aristocratic liberalism’s propensity to overtake democracy.30

With our cultural confusions and self-deceptions and financial entanglements with every pure evil, the West has dissolved its borders and arguably itself. The claim that Orwell’s Cold War may be brought to an equation balancing the West and China, that 1984’s Big Brother is Xi Jinping, is on arrival so very flawed an analog as to merit an endless debunking. On the flip side, the Orwell canon has been so overanalyzed and cited that one could meander through an endless proof that demonstrated the equation oh-so correct. Orwell, a spy? Orwell, a truth-seeking Jedi? The whole of the Orwell debate is likewise endless, as is the whole of the Orwell commission, history, literary studies, biography; there will always be that many more subjects to research, and essays to write, and texts to translate.31 The tasks are infinite, and decrease in impact and importance into infinite pointlessness. In 1950, Irving Howe decreed what was then agreed to be the final word on 1984; today, Howe’s praise is arrogant, insufferable, and painfully obvious.32 Almost all of Orwell’s journalism and personal writing is whining and stinking of body odor. He was a man who was very hard to like: selfaggrandizing33 and self-pitying.34 As a critic, he was mediocre; as a political columnist, engrossed in day-to-day squabbles; as a novelist, sentimental, and imperialist. The best thing about George Orwell was Animal Farm, and yet even Animal Farm was scuffed with the black mark of his policeman’s boot. Why are we still fond of Orwell? We keep asking. Maybe it’s that he was such a genuinely sincere propagandist. Maybe, where we once loved him despite the compact he made with the devil, we are now denizens of so broken an epoch that we love him because of it. And/or, maybe we are touched by the ability he had, every so often, to see himself. As he wrote in the closing passages to Homage to Catalonia 35 : 30

Jacob Dreyer. “The Rise and Fall of Chimera.” Noema, 2022; Jacob Dreyer is also the editor of this collection. 31 The novella Bunt by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont, for example, is another precursor to Animal Farm that has yet to see translation into English. 32

“1984—Utopia Reversed.” The New International. vol. XVI no. 6, November 1950.

33

“Why I Write.” Gangrel , Summer 1946.

34

“Such, Such Were the Joys.” Partisan Review, 1952.

35

Secker and Warburg, 1938.

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It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.

Whatever the process, by whatever hand or disclosure, Orwell has come to the end. But it is a new kind of ending, an ending emblematic of our time: an irrational number that tallies off into eternity, reducing itself, obscuring a complete understanding, forever. The end of Orwell is not sudden, but a continuum of near repetition, a getting smaller and smaller. There will never be a full stop, just the diminishing, in perpetuity.

2013: Animal Farm Timeline April 12, 2013

Timeline to This Timeline1 September 9, 2011, I’m walking down Lafayette Street with my wife. We’re close to my apartment, with the Tribeca sky, the sky of my youth, hovering above our destination. I have a title idea. “Snowball’s Chance,” I say, “there’s something to it.” She isn’t so sure. Then, 9/11. Then, 9/13, I understand the title. Animal Farm. Snowball returns to the farm, bringing capitalism, which has its own pitfalls. I’ll turn the Cold War allegory on its head—apply Orwell’s thinking to what had happened in the fifty years since the end of World War II. Three weeks later I have a clean draft. I start to think about publication and run into a bump: the feeling in the publishing world, in the entertainment world, is that parody is about to lose its protected status in the United States. Several major lawsuits are underway

A version of this essay was originally published by The Paris Review. 1 I pitched this piece to The Paris Review when there was an ongoing discussion about the legitimacy of arts and culture venues that had been outed as taking money and/or orders from the Congress for Cultural Freedom and/or the CIA. With the Orwell discussion still at a pitch, I wondered if The Paris Review, long known to have had CCF/CIA ties, would be willing to acknowledge its own history publicly. This timeline seemed like it could be an easy way to do that; more of an aside than a confession. In the first 1950 entry of this timeline, a passage referring to The Paris Review in this context went untouched through editorial.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Reed, The Never End, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_2

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(2 Live Crew, The Wind Done Gone 2 ), copyright has been extended indefinitely for major corporations, and the Supreme Court has never looked more conservative. Given the climate, and that parody is not protected in the UK, the Orwell estate announces itself “hostile” to my manuscript. The book is nevertheless released in 2002 (by a small but longstanding press, Roof Books), and supported in part by a State grant. At the same moment, I see fit to attack Animal Farm as a Cold War allegory—an allegory that I see as conservative, xenophobic, and a bludgeon for radical thinking—Christopher Hitchens, who has taken a sharp turn to the right, sees the need to defend it. In Why Orwell Matters , also published in 2002 (Basic Books), Hitchens attempted to apply Orwell’s later life “Cold War,”3 to a stance against terrorism. The media picks up on Hitchens, and Snowball’s Chance as a counterpoint, and the books are accordingly praised or derided.

2

Alice Randall. HarperCollins, 2002.

3

Discussed in the second “1945” entry of this timeline.

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1879/1880 Nikolai Kostomarov (1817–1885) pens his story, “Animal Riot,” a farmyard allegory that takes as its analog a hypothetical Russian revolution.4 A century later, 1988, the English-language Economist will compare Kostomarov’s 8,500-word story to George Orwell’s20,000-word Russian-Revolution allegory, Animal Farm (which, unlike “Animal Riot,” ends badly), finding numerous points of comparison. For example, a bull in “Animal Riot”: Brother bulls, sisters and cow wives. Esteemed beasts worthy of a better destiny than the one which inexplicably befell you and made you a slave of tyrant Man! The hour has come to cast off vile slavery and take revenge for all our ancestors tormented by work, starved and fed repulsive feed, who collapsed dead under whips and heavy carts, who were killed at slaughterhouses and torn to pieces by our tormentors. Rally with hooves and horns.

Old Major in Animal Farm: Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength. … Why do we then continue in this miserable condition? Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labor is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word—Man.

4 Drafted by the author circa 1879, first known publication in 1917 (Niva), translated (by Tanya Paperny) and published in English in 2015 (selected text, Harper’s Magazine), published in English in full in 2016 (Paperny translation, PANK Magazine, January 9). The full Paperny translation is included in this collection.

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1917 In commemoration of the February revolution and the deposition of the Tsar, Kostomarov’s now prescient “Animal Riot” is reissued.5 In “Animal Riot,” Kostomarov—who has been dead for thirty-two years—weaved his primary interests: political radicalism, historical consciousness, and folkloric tradition. The story realizes an equation in Marxist analysis: the worker = the farm/plow animal. During his lifetime, Kostomarov—poet, playwright, novelist, historian, environmentalist, spiritualist, and social critic—was a lauded figure, albeit in the Russian style: variously censored, arrested, blacklisted, exiled, and imprisoned. In 1917, Mykhailo Hrushevsky is the head of the Central Rada (Ukraine’s revolutionary parliament). Hrushevsky, who rose to power as a historian, credits Kostomarov as a primary influence. Through the 1920s, Hrushevsky is a prominent political force and political scholar in Soviet Ukraine.

5

Drafted by the author circa 1879, first known publication in 1917 (Niva).

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1934 Exiled and under the watch of the secret police, Hrushevsky dies in suspicious circumstances. Eric Blair, already published as George Orwell, is living in Southwold, recuperating from a bout of pneumonia contracted on a motorcycle tour. Now supported by his friends and parents, he will not return to academic employment. Orwell is attending meetings of the Communist Party, where Hrushevsky and his death are a topic of discussion. Hrushevsky and Kostomarov (the author of “Animal Riot”) are commonly referenced in the books and scholarship of the day. Kostomarov is a figure strikingly analogous to Blair: their class position (the poorest of the rich); their sickly disposition; and their interests (from the political to the environmental). In 1864, Kostomarov asserted that his writings had to meet a fundamental standard of “strict, relentless truth,” foretelling Orwell’s posture of truth at no compromise. Orwell’s 1941 essay “England my England” echoes Kostomarov’s 1860 essay “Two Russian Nationalities,” which divided the nation, by class, into two distinct existences. Orwell: “There is no question about the inequality of wealth in England. It is grosser than in any European country, and you have only to look down the nearest street to see it. Economically, England is certainly two nations.”

1936? For six months, 1936/1937, Orwell serves in a Trotskyite regimen on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War. (H.G. Wells described Orwell as “a Trotskyite with big feet,” and T.S. Eliot characterized Orwell’s political position as “generally Trotskyite.”) Taller than the average Spanish fighter, Orwell is admonished not to stand upright in the trench. Forgetting the warning—May 1937—Orwell is caught by a bullet to the throat. He returns to England. The time in Spain is formative, and as Orwell writes in the essay to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (1947), it is thereafter that he begins to ponder a farm revolution. For the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement. On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone, and which could easily be translated into other languages. However, the actual details of the story did not come to me for some time until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.6

6 This genesis story, of course, is a rehash of Dostoevsky’s instigating event in Crime and Punishment : the scene is noted and reproduced in “Pigs, Goats, Tea Parties, Walking Magnets & Scotch Central,” which is included in this collection.

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1939 For Orwell and many socialists, the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939 is a catalyst for a final break from Stalin’s Russia. Until now, Orwell has held formation, taking the Independent Labor Party (ILP) anti-war position. With the Pact, Orwell reverses course, hawking for war via, among other outlets, Partisan Review, Tribune, and the BBC . In his 1941 essay “The Lion and the Unicorn,” he writes: “This war is a race between the consolidation of Hitler’s empire and the growth of democratic consciousness.”

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1941 From 1941 until 1943, Orwell is employed as a propagandist for the BBC . As a Talks Producer assigned to the BBC ’s Eastern Service, he is charged with promoting British wartime agendas to the UK’s Indian population. He produces some “Arts & Letters” segments and writes newsletters (news and opinion), several hundred, which are read aloud for broadcast in English and translation7 .

7 James Smith. British Writers and M15 Surveillance, 1930–1960. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

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1944 Orwell begins work on Animal Farm in 1943, completes it in 1944, and approaches five publishers. Despite Orwell’s letters of submission, which states that he won’t be open to edits (his rejection letters are rejection/editorial letters), the manuscript secures a speedy release. The Faber & Faber editor, T.S. Eliot, an Anglican Royalist that Orwell regards as a fascist, is nevertheless Orwell’s first tier—but Eliot has passed on Orwell’s previous projects, and Orwell is not optimistic about landing a powerful publisher. While Eliot’s assessment of Animal Farm will be derided historically, his letter of rejection identifies the fault that will allow Animal Farm to be disseminated as propaganda. “The effect is simply one of negation,” writes Eliot, “The book ought to excite sympathy with what the author wants, as well as with his objections. … Your pigs are much 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 without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.” Orwell’s wartime BBC acquaintance, William Empson, similarly warns Orwell that the “racial differences” of the farmyard justified the birthright of a leadership class. “Your metaphor—the intellectual superiority of the pigs—suggests that the Russian revolution was a pathetically impossible effort to defy nature. You must expect to be ‘misunderstood’ about this book on a large scale.” Orwell also submits the manuscript to his friend and publisher, Victor Gollancz, who has the option on Orwell’s next work of fiction. Orwell frets that Gollancz is a poor political pairing for Animal Farm. Orwell is right: Gollancz balks on political grounds. (Gollancz, even years later, described Orwell as a “much overrated writer.”) The Dial Press, a puzzling prospect, returns Orwell and his agent an equally puzzling rejection: animal stories, they say (this in the era of Disney), don’t sell. Jonathan Cape, of the London publisher, Page & Co., is initially interested in the manuscript, but then claims to have been warned off by a representative by the Ministry of Information. Cape, upon reflection, fears the Russians, equated to pigs, will take offense. Secker & Walburg, where Orwell has previously worked as an editor, acquires Animal Farm for its 1945 list.

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1945 Orwell proposes to Celia Kirwan. Timothy Garton Ash sums up the event in his 2003 apologia, “Orwell’s List” (The New York Review of Books ). To this depressed and mortally ill political writer of genius there came, in February 1949, a delightful piece of personal news. Celia Kirwan (née Paget) had returned to London from Paris. Celia was a strikingly beautiful, vivacious, and warmhearted young woman who moved in left-wing literary circles, as did her twin sister Mamaine, who would marry Orwell’s friend Arthur Koestler in 1950. Orwell had met Celia when they spent Christmas together in Wales with Arthur and Mamaine in 1945. He was lonely and in some emotional turmoil after the death of his first wife earlier that year. Celia and he got on very well, and met again several times in London. One evening just five weeks after their first meeting, he sent her a passionate letter, full of tender feeling and rather clumsily proposing either marriage or an affair. It ended, “good night my dearest love, George.” Celia gently refused him in what she later described as a “rather ambiguous letter,” but they remained close friends. A year later, she went to work for an intellectual review in Paris.

One thing to add to Ash’s missive: when Orwell proposes to Celia Kirwan, she’s still married to the poet Patrick Kirwan—though the divorce is in the offing.

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1945 Orwell is credited with coining the term, “cold war,” in the following passage of his October 19, 1945, essay “You and the Atomic Bomb,” Tribune, a leftleaning newspaper/journal8 : For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the re-imposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham’s theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications—that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.

The term, which neatly encapsulated a Western political and cultural outlook that had been developing since the late 1930s, partly indicates a real paradigm, and partly indicates a projection for the future, and a paradigm that would emerge from fantastical thinking backed by imperial power; an insistence on a political argument so tyrannical that it maps the planet. Through official and unofficial organizations and governmental arms—The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, The Congress for Cultural Freedom, the United States Information Agency, the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office (later, MI6)—a western-centric perspective has been broadly disseminated by all means available. Partisan Review publishes Orwell’s “Letters from London,” among the many Western bellwethers: “letters” from Moscow and Kenya; and western writers are “sentimental travelers” “looking for India.” This soft war perspective—voyeuristic, disdainful, crusading— think-tanks through World War II in intellectual and creative circles. As writes Andrew Rubin, in Archives of Authority 9 : Journals and magazines were drop-shipped transnationally with greater velocity by air. Writers working in faraway places were read at new proximities in both time and place. New means of reproduction and replication overcame geographic distances. In “Marrakech,” a text George Orwell published in New Writing in 1939,” he wrote, “When you walk through a town like this—twohundred thousand inhabitants, of whom at least twenty thousand have nothing but rags they stand up in—when you see how people live, and still more easily 8 9

If the term wasn’t entirely Orwell’s, he was one of the earliest in-print adopters.

Princeton University Press, 2012; Melvin Lasky. “A Sentimental Traveler in Japan.” Encounter, no. 2 (November, 1953); Vojay Prashad. The Darker Nations. LeftWord Books, 2007.

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how they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are still walking among human beings.” … Spheres of influence, barbed wires, airlifts, zones, cryptocommunists, fellow travelers, the bomb, covert actions, propaganda, neutralism, non-alignment, free world, un-American activities, Sputnik, arms race, peace dividend—a whole new battery of language and rhetoric refigured one of the most seemingly incurable imperial rivalries. … New vocabularies of imaginary geographies arose. Out of Asia came “areas”; terrains were spatialized by new signals of distance and orientation: “Middle East,” “Southeast Asia,” “South Asia,” and “East Asia,” replaced the “Near East,” and “Far East.”

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1945/1946 Animal Farm is published the month of the German surrender—the exact moment to launch a long-awaited attack on Russian policies. The Cold War that Orwell has named embraces Animal Farm, which becomes part of the post-war, UK debate, and outperforms expectations. The US market isn’t excited about the property, but three occurrences will lead to a print run of a half a million books: Frank Morley of Harcourt Brace chances upon the novel in Cambridge; in The New Yorker, Edmund Wilson hails the US edition10 ; the Book-of-the-Month Club offers the title as a main selection.

10 The US reviews were, on the whole, mildly positive or tepid. George Soule, writing for The New Republic (September 2, 1946), explained the appeal of the allegory: “There are times when a reviewer is happy to report that a book is bad because it fulfills his hope that the author will expose himself in a way that permits a long-deserved castigation. This is not one of them, I was expecting that Orwell would again give pleasure and that his satire of the sort of thing which democrats deplore in the Soviet Union would be keen and cleansing. Instead, the book puzzled and saddened me. It seemed on the whole dull. … Does he mean to say that not these pigs, but Snowball, should have been on top? Or that all the animals should have been merged in a common primitive communism without leaders or organization? Or that it was a mistake to try to industrialize, because pastoral simplicity is the condition of equality and cooperation? Or that, as in the old saw criticizing socialism, the possibility of a better society is a pipe-dream, because if property were distributed equally, the more clever and selfish would soon get a larger share and things would go on as of old? Though I am sure he did not intend this moral, the chances are that a sample poll of the bookclub readers in the United States would indicate that a large majority think so and will heartily approve the book on that account.”

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1946 In 1946, the second issue of Polemic (where Celia Kirwan works as an editorial assistant) publishes Orwell’s “The Prevention of Literature.” The fifth issue of Polemic follows up Orwell’s essay with a response (annotated by Orwell) by the communist poet Randall Swingler, who served in Italy during World War II (he was awarded the Military Medal of the British Army). While Swingler agrees with Orwell that a writer must “dare to be a Daniel,” he objects to Orwell’s broad sweeps and “intellectual swashbucklery.” Moreover, Swingler doesn’t see Daniel in Orwell: “What in heaven is Orwell really worried about? He appears at the moment to be getting more space than any other journalist to report truthfully. … Orwell’s posture of lonely rebel hounded by monstrous pro-Soviet monopolists has a somewhat crocodile appearance.” An alternative read of Orwell persists after Orwell’s literary canonization. In a 1971 collection of essays about Orwell, Raymond Williams—novelist, critic, and the driving force of Cultural Materialism—will draw a portrait of Orwell as an architect of orthodox thinking who mounts a “successful impersonation of the plain man who bumps into experience in an unmediated way, and is simply telling the truth about it.” Salman Rushdie, in his 1984 essay “Outside the Whale,” echoes the position: “Orwell … is advocating ideas that can only be in the service of our masters.”

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1947–1960 On November 25, 1947, ten writers and directors, who have refused to testify before the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), are cited for Contempt of Congress. The “Hollywood Ten”: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Sam Ornitz, Robert Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo. HUAC is the final incarnation of government committees dating back to 1918: the Overman Committee (1918–1919); the Fish Committee (1930); the McCormack-Dickstein Committee (1934–1937); and the Dies Committee (1938–1944). In all, over 320 artists and creatives are blacklisted by major film studios and broadcasters. Some will work pseudonymously, and some will never again work in US entertainment. A 1950 pamphlet, Red Channels , lists 151 broadcast and entertainment professionals under the categorization “Red Fascists and their sympathizers.” The blacklist will endure until 1960.

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1948 The Information Research Department (IRD) is formed by the British Foreign Office, which is overseen by MI6. Novelist Fay Weldon will later recall that when an MI6 figure walks down the hall she and her colleagues are instructed to turn their backs, “Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by.” The IRD is the brainchild of Christopher Mayhew, who in 1947 as a junior minister, proposed a “propaganda counter offensive.” For the next thirty years, the IRD will exercise its influence through a miscellany of media, particularly the written word and radio (i.e., the BBC ). The IRD will publish, distribute, and translate works by Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, and many other noted figures. Timothy Garton Ash, in his 2010 book, Facts Are Subversive (Yale University Press) investigates the doings of the IRD, known informally as “the dirty tricks department.” The IRD, writes Ash, indulges in “character assassination, false telegrams, putting itching powder on lavatory seats, and other such cold war pranks … little of which will be found in the files, even if the intelligencerelated ones are finally released.” Ash: “the IRD’s anti-communist activities were Britain’s equivalent of the McCarthyite witchhunt.” Animal Farm is a core IRD project: the IRD broadcasts the novel on “Voice of America” produces a cartoon that it distributes in multiple languages, and sponsors translated editions of the work world-over (Orwell helped the IRD strategize circulation). Suffice it to say: Asia (China, Vietnam, and Korea), Europe (especially Eastern Europe), South America and Central America, and anywhere that has a language worth bothering about. To cite Andrew Rubin in his 2012 book, Archives of Authority (Princeton University Press): “Few books in the history of English literature enjoyed such a rapid diffusion into as many languages as Animal Farm.”11

1949 Celia Kirwan, now working for Robert Conquest, a staffer of the IRD, visits Orwell. Orwell is sick with tuberculosis—he will recover, marry, relapse, and die within the year. He will also work with the IRD on the promulgation of Animal Farm, as well as several lists of IRD enemies (at least two lists) that he will hand over to Kirwan.12 According to Bernard Crick, the prominent

11 Among other books that tell the story of Animal Farm and the IRD: Paul Lashmar and James Oliver. Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948–1977 . Sutton, 1998; Tony Shaw. British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus. Bloomsbury, 2001; Frances Stonor Saunders. Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War. Granta Books, 1999. 12

Andrew Rubin. Archives of Authority. Princeton University Press, 2012. For overview of the efforts of the distribute and translate Animal Farm, and Kirwan’s involvement, see pages 41–43.

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Orwell biographer, Arthur Koestler (who is soon-to-be Kirwan’s brother-inlaw, and who is employed by the IRD and the CIA), also contributes to the enemies lists. (In 1950, the IRD will purchase 50,000 copies of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and distribute the books in Germany; the CIA will support the US release of Darkness at Noon.) The enemies lists log and report upon, primarily, writers, intellectuals, and artists13 .

13 Andrew Rubin. Archives of Authority. Princeton University Press, 2012. See page 30: “Although Orwell may not have known it, he effectively turned over the names to the IRD to use for whatever purposes they chose to put them to. In fact, the list was not simply an effort to recruit writers to effectively represent British interests abroad; it was part of the development of a political and cultural response to what its leadership saw as the spread of Soviet influence in Southeast Asia.”

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1949 In letters written responding to early reviews of 1984 (the novel was released on June 8, 1949), Orwell bemoaned interpretations of the novel which viewed the central message as defeatist and/or reactionary: If people think I am defending the status quo, that is, I think, because they have grown pessimistic and assume that there is no alternative except dictatorship or laissez-faire capitalism. … What I was trying to say was, “You can’t have a revolution unless you make it for yourself; there is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship.”14

Orwell would finally organize his ideas into what he referred to later that year as “a sort of dementi,” which he released in a June 15 press release via his publisher. Statement on Nineteen Eighty-Four It has been suggested by some of the reviewers of Nineteen Eighty-Four that it is the author’s view that this, or something like this, is what will happen inside the next forty years in the Western world. This is not correct. I think that, allowing for the book being after all a parody, something like Nineteen EightyFour could happen [underlining is Orwell’s]. This is the direction in which the world is going at the present time, and the trend lies deep in the political, social and economic foundations of the contemporary world situation. Specifically, the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on Liberal capitalist communities, by the necessity to prepare for total war with the USSR and the new weapons, of which—of course—the atom bomb is the most powerful, and the most publicized. But danger lies also in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook, by intellectuals of all colors. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don’t let it happen. It depends on you.

These last eight words, underlined, are falsely mythologized as the last words written by Orwell.

14

Edited by Peter Hobley Davison. George Orwell: Life in Letters. Liveright, 2013. Letter to Dwight Macdonald, 1946; a longer extract of Orwell’s letter appears in The New York Review of Books .

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1950 The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) is launched by the CIA.15 The CCF—Arthur Koestler is one of the founders—will promote the cultural cache and political philosophy of the West. As summarized by Frances Stonor Saunders in Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War: During the height of the Cold War, the US government committed vast resources to a secret program of cultural propaganda in western Europe. A central feature of this program was to advance the claim that it did not exist. It was managed, in great secrecy, by America’s espionage arm, the Central Intelligence Agency. The centerpiece of this covert campaign was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967. Its achievements—not least its duration—were considerable. At its peak the Congress for Cultural Freedom had offices in thirty-five countries, employed dozens of personnel, published over twenty prestige magazines, held art exhibitions, owned a news and features service, organized high-profile international conferences, and rewarded musicians and artists with prizes and public performances. Its mission was to nudge the intelligentsia of Western Europe away from its lingering fascination with Marxism and Communism towards a view more accommodating of “the American way.”

In the coming decades, the reach of the CCF will extend immeasurably into the life of America’s arts and letters. (Even The Paris Review will be, at the very least, financially enabled by US covert activity, as is graphed by Joel Whitney in “The Paris Review, The Cold War and the CIA,” Salon, 2012.) Arguably, the CCF directs the course of US art and literature in the twentieth century. According to the CIA’s own website (2012): “The Congress for Cultural Freedom is widely considered one of the CIA’s more daring and effective Cold War covert operations.”

15

The inception of the Congress for Cultural Freedom dates back to at least 1948— and earlier if regarded as an evolution of previous directives and entities. For overview, see: Andrew Rubin. Archives of Authority. Princeton University Press, 2012.

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1950 Orwell dies of a burst artery in his lung—a complication of his tuberculosis. Four months earlier, Orwell had married Sonia Brownell, fifteen years his junior. Sonia, as Orwell’s widow, will be lambasted, defended, and heralded. Famously beautiful, Sonia will go on to a reputation as a grand dame of the arts and literature in London and Paris. She’ll be noted for her affairs (she remarries Major Michael Pitt-Rivers, who is gay) and social interventions; her work as the fierce literary guardian, executor, and strategist of Orwell’s estate, though known, will subplot a life chronically portrayed as tragic).

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1951 The CIA courts Sonia Orwell and options Animal Farm for film.16 The CIA’s Cold War agenda is apparent enough, but Orwell is not yet a literary icon, and Sonia’s primary concern may well be the longevity of Orwell’s legacy. Orwell’s involvement with MI6 and the CIA’s upkeep and not-covert, day-to-day involvement in the film project—as documented by Daniel Leab in Orwell Subverted 17 —make it extremely unlikely that Sonia and other partners of the Orwell estate are oblivious to the constant CIA presence. The English animation firm chosen for the project, Halas & Batchelor, has heretofore produced—almost exclusively—military propaganda and promotional materials. Animal Farm was initially identified as a potentially useful property by the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a covert strategy unit of the Department of State and (as of 1951) the CIA, on the merits of its adaptability to an animated film, which would be disseminated to industrial and even illiterate workers, as well as to school-age viewers. Orwell’s leftist reputation was an additional advantage; any true ends of the project could be obfuscated. Through the 50s, a primary mission and forte of the OPC was the clandestine financing of films to be distributed in nations deemed susceptible to communism or communist influence.18 One story contends that Sonia cedes the film rights to Animal Farm only upon delivery of a dinner date with Clark Gable. According to the Paper Trail, Jon Elliston’s internet discussion of declassified information, CIA official Joe Bryan made the arrangements “as a measure of thanks.”19

16 Howard Hunt, later infamous for his participation in the Watergate break-ins of the Nixon era, places himself at the crux of the CIA operation in his tell-all. Undercover: Memoirs of an American Secret Agent. Berkley Publishing Group, 1974. 17

Orwell Subverted: The CIA and Filming of Animal Farm. Pennsylvania University Press, 2008. 18 19

Tony Shaw. Hollywood’s Cold War. Edinburgh University Press, 2007.

George Orwell. 1984: “The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time.”

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1951 Lord Bertrand Russell, one of five honorary chairs of the CCF, and a prominent IRD collaborator and advocate of aggressive propaganda,20 outlines the logic of “cultural education” in his 1952 book, The Impact of Science on Society 21 : The subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology. … Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education.’ Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the Press, the cinema and the radio play an increasing part. What is essential in mass psychology is the art of persuasion. If you compare a speech of Hitler’s with a speech of (say) Edmund Burke, you will see what strides have been made in the art since the eighteenth century. What went wrong formerly was that people had read in books that man is a rational animal, and framed their arguments on this hypothesis. We now know that limelight and a brass band do more to persuade than can be done by the most elegant train of syllogisms. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment. … Anaxagoras maintained that snow is black, but no one believed him. The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakeable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity. But I anticipate. It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black, and how much less it would cost to make them believe it is dark grey. … The completeness of the resulting control over opinion depends in various ways upon scientific technique. Where all children go to school, and all schools are controlled by the government, the authorities can close the minds of the young to everything contrary to official orthodoxy. … Education should aim at destroying free will, so that, after pupils have left school, they shall be incapable, throughout the rest of their lives, of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished. ... Any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.

The previous year, 1950, Bertrand Russell was awarded a Nobel Prize.

20 Broadly documented. For example: Andrew G. Bone. “Bertrand Russell as Cold War Propagandist.” The Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly, February–May 2005. 21 Simon & Schuster. To this day, the debate endures: was the work, however intentionally or unwittingly, a parody, a portent, a manifesto, or all three?

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1954 Animal Farm, the first British feature-length animated film, premieres in New York City at the chic Paris Theatre, December 29, 1954. To much pomp, Sonia Orwell attends the event and tours the city, visiting celebrities and literary figures. The premiere receives global coverage and is generally praised, with some exception taken by the far left and far right. Variety calls the film “a powerful preachment.” Time Magazine applauds the filmmakers for challenging audiences to “look the Soviet horror square in the eye.” The New York Times : “vivid and biting.” The anti-Soviet revision applied to the ending of the Animal Farm presages the revision of the Michael Redgrave feature film of 1984, also overseen by the CIA, which was refitted to more closely equate communism to Big Brother.22

1956 Christopher Montague “Monty” Woodhouse, the fifth Baron of Terrington, contributes an introduction to the first US paperback edition of Animal Farm. Woodhouse, an Oxford professor and conservative Parliamentary politician, cites Orwell’s 1946 essay, “Why I Write,” quoting the sentence, “Every line I have written since 1936 has been against totalitarianism.” Woodhouse elides the conclusion of the sentence, “and for democratic socialism.” Michael Peters, in his 1995 essay “Animal Farm, Fifty Years On” (Contemporary Review), will credit Orwell with having anticipated the elision: “Whilst Orwell was happy to see his book used to attack the Soviet myth, he did become increasingly worried about the way it was being used by the right as a means of demonstrating that all revolutionary change was bound to fail.”

1965–1974 As part of an increasingly formalized relationship between popular entertainment and governmental agendizing and imaging, ABC, in their crimeenforcement positive series The FBI , thanks J. Edgar Hoover for his cooperation in every one of their 241 episodes. Hoover consults for the show until his death in 1972 and provides governmental cooperation with ABC to the degree that some scenes are filmed in Washington DC at FBI Headquarters.

22

Andrew Rubin. Archives of Authority. Princeton University Press, 2012. Pages 43–44.

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The FBI, previously, had supported and worked on “G” Men, starring James Cagney (Warner Brothers, 1935), The Untouchables (ABC, 1959–1963) and The FBI Story, starring James Stewart (Warner Brothers, 1959)23 .

23 Matthew Alford. Reel Power. Pluto Press, 2010; Tricia Jenkins. The CIA in Hollywood. University of Texas Press, 2016; Geoff Martin and Erin Steuter. Pop Culture Goes to War. Lexington Books, 2010; David L. Robb. Operation Hollywood. Prometheus, 2011. Mark Wollaeger. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda. Princeton University Press, 2008, etc. The relationship of Hollywood to perceived US policies and interests plays out in media that is sometimes managed covertly, and sometimes in implicit agreement with US positions; in 2001, for example, the Brad Pitt, Robert Redford vehicle, Spy Game, sets up a conflict/changing of the guard: the old Cold War v. the new Cold War. The United States. v. Russia → the United States. v. China.

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1996 In 1996 The Independent “breaks” the story: “Orwell’s little list leaves the left gasping for more.” Investigation of the list (which had actually been previously known and documented in, for example, Bernard Crick’s 1980 biography of George Orwell: A Life 24 ) gains momentum, and in 1998, The Telegraph headlines the story: “Socialist Icon Who Became an Informer.” If The Telegraph isn’t first on the scene, they are ready with the shocking conclusion: “it was as if Winston Smith had willingly cooperated with the Thought Police.” The “breaking story” is of enemies lists that Orwell handed over to Celia Kirwan and the IRD. The first list: 135 names in a handwritten notebook. While the news is of Orwell’s documented betrayal of “fellow travelers,” there’s an unpleasant addendum: a plethora of racist, homophobic, and creepy remarks. Also, the list is replete with vindictive inclusions: for example, “Douglas Goldring,” on a second list of thirty-eight names, criticized Orwell for having revealed troop strategies and movements of the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War. The list of thirty-eight, which is typed, presumably compiles the more notable threats; the document is declassified in 2003—though an additional seven names remain a secret of the State, as do any official list or lists generated by Orwell’s disclosures. Of the seven names withheld, one can surmise embarrassing or sensitive contents. Such as? The list of seven was an “A” list, those to be regarded as the most hostile to the interests of MI6. Or, the list consisted of persons blacklisted during the McCarthy Red Scare, or persons who suffered obvious consequences of political affiliation. Charlie Chaplin is on Orwell’s list and was blacklisted in the United States—but more damning to Orwell’s reputation would be a Red Scare correspondence to lesser-known figures—especially if, for example, all seven on an “A” list suffered repercussions. In addition to the known lists, Crick (prominent Orwell biographer) references a list of eighty-six names prepared by Orwell and Arthur Koestler. 86 + 38 + 7 = 131. The conjecture: might there originally have been three lists? Most dangerous to least dangerous? The correspondence between Orwell and Celia Kirwan is connotative of a long and active exchange. Shortly after giving over the first list, for example, Orwell indicated there was more work to be done; the collaboration was ongoing. As released by the Information Research Department, in 1998:

24

Little Brown, 1980.

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Cranham April 6th, 1949 Dear Celia, I haven’t written earlier because I have really been rather poorly, and I can’t use the typewriter even now, so I hope you will be able to cope with my handwriting. I couldn’t think of any more names to add to your possible list of writers except FRANZ BORKENAU [caps are Orwell’s] (The Observer would know his address) whose name I think I gave you, and GLEB STRUVE [caps are Orwell’s] (he’s at Pasadena in California at present), the Russian translator and critic. Of course there are hordes of Americans, whose names can be found in The (New York) New Leader, the Jewish monthly paper Commentary, and Partisan Review. I could also, if it is of any value, give you a list of journalists and writers who in my opinion are crypto-communists, fellow travelers or inclined that way and should not be trusted as propagandists. But for that I shall have to send for a notebook which I have at home, and if I do give you such a list it is strictly confidential … [Orwell’s ellipsis.] Just one idea occurred to me for propaganda not abroad but in this country. A friend of mine in Stockholm tells me that as the Swedes didn’t make films of their own one sees a lot of German and Russian films, and some of the Russian films, which of course would not normally reach this country, are unbelievably scurrilous anti-British propaganda. He referred especially to a historical film about the Crimean war. As the Swedes can get hold of these films I suppose we can; might it not be a good idea to have showings of some of them in this country … [Orwell’s ellipsis.] I read the enclosed article with interest, but it seems to me anti-religious rather than anti-semitic.25 For what my opinion is worth, I don’t think anti-antisemitism is a strong card to play in anti-Russian propaganda. The USSR must in practice be somewhat anti-semitic, as it is opposed both to Zionism within its own borders and on the other hand to the liberalism and internationalism of the non-Zionist Jews, but a polyglot state of that kind can never be officially anti-semitic, in the Nazi manner, just as the British Empire cannot. If you try to tie up Communism with anti-semitism, it is always possible in reply to point to people like Kaganovich or Anna Pauleer, also to the large number of Jews in the Communist parties everywhere. I also think it is bad policy to try to curry favor with your enemies. The Zionist Jews everywhere hate us and regard Britain as the enemy, more even than Germany. Of course this is based on misunderstanding, but as long as it is so I do not think we do ourselves any good by denouncing anti-semitism in other nations. I am sorry I can’t write a better letter, but I really have felt so lousy the last few days. Perhaps a bit later I’ll get some ideas. 25

The choice of the lower case is Orwell’s.

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With love, George. I DID suggest DARCY GILLY, (Manchester Guardian) didn’t I? There is also a man called CHOLLERTON (expert on the Moscow trials) who could be contacted through The Observer. [Caps are Orwell’s.]

Additional IRD/Orwell records, and to what extent there are such records, remain classified26 .

26

Remains unclear as of 2023.

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2002 In 2002, Christopher Hitchens publishes Why Orwell Matters ,27 which explains away Orwell’s role as an MI6 informant.28 Snowball’s Chance,29 also a short book, and published in near simultaneity, is paired with Why Orwell Matters in media discussion. Hitchens, modeling himself on Orwell’s late life conservatism, argues vociferously for United States and UK military commitment in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Orwell estate, a corporate concern with a litigious history, formally objects to Snowball’s Chance. (Full circle: back to my bias.) Bill Hamilton, the literary executor to the estate, logs his disapproval in a letter to James Sherry, the publisher of Snowball’s Chance. Writes Hamilton: “the clear references to 9/11 in the apocalyptic ending can only bring Orwell’s name into disrepute in the U.S. I am alarmed that you would consider publication of this book without first clearing the rights in principle with us: the original is of course in copyright, as are the characters and ideas. I must consider what further action to take.” The threats do not deter Sherry, but UK distribution is quashed. Over the Christmas and New Years of 2002/2003, Black Ink Books, an Australian/English publisher (parody is not protected in the UK), makes an offer, commits to an agreement, then demurs.

27

Basic Books.

28

Much of the confusion about who Orwell reported to is the result of a merry-goround of nomenclature employed by UK intelligence forces; Orwell gave his lists directly to the Information Research Department, which was the covert propaganda department of the British Foreign Office. The IRD had a weighty presence at the BBC , which it broadly expanded upon in the first decades of the Cold War. The IRD was so closely tied to MI6 that when the IRD was disbanded, MI6 took up IRD operations. MI5, in relation, was domestic operations. 29

Roof Books.

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2007–? The 2007 release of Orwell’s M15/Special Branch file by the UK’s national archives is largely a non-event. While newspapers muster headlines (The Guardian manages a desultory, “Odd clothes and unorthodox views—why MI5 spied on Orwell for a decade”) the reportage and the contents of the declassified documents are unspectacular. “Orewell,” as his name is repeatedly misspelled in the materials, was not deemed a threat.30 James Smith, in his 2013 examination, British Writers and M15 Surveillance (Cambridge University Press), summarizes: More than perhaps any other case addressed in this study, the surveillance of Orwell by M15 has been the subject of extensive media comment. … The reality is, however, that each of Orwell’s files is slim. The Special Branch file covers material from 1936 to 1942 and runs to around twenty-four pages, and the MI5 file spans 1936 to 1951 and contains thirty-eight pages (some of which duplicate Special Branch material). Orwell was therefore one of the least [italics are Smith’s] monitored of the writers in this study.

George Orwell’s diaries, published in 2012,31 ellicit a media response patterned on keeping Orwell’s secrets. In his review, “Garden of Notes by Author of Animal Farm,” Dwight Garner of The New York Times 32 warns readers against Orwell’s “gardening diaries,” which are “terse, factual, telegrammatic.” The Daily Beast , however, looks at the diaries in the light of what they reveal about Orwell’s writings. Jimmy So, in his review, “Orwell’s Lies,”33 compares Orwell’s nonfiction with the source material found in the diaries, confirming a long-held opinion that Orwell was a little wishy-washy on the details.

30 “UK Spy Agency Kept File on George Orwell for 2 Decades.” Associated Press, 2007; Stephen Bates. “Odd Clothes and Unorthodox Views—Why MI5 Spied on Orwell for a Decade.” The Guardian, 2007; “MI5 Spy Agency to Release Secret File on George Orwell.” The New York Times , 2007; David Caute. Red List: MI5 and British Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century. Verso Books, 2022. 31

Edited by Peter Davison. George Orwell Diaries. Liveright, 2012.

32

“Garden of Notes by Author of Animal Farm.” The New York Times , 2012.

33

“Orwell’s Lies: His Diaries Reveal Problems with the Truth.” The Daily Beast , August 19, 2012.

2013: George Orwell’s “Freedom of the Press,” a Proposed Preface to Animal Farm, Expurgated and Footnoted (with a Bias) November/December 2013

This book was first thought of, so far as the central idea goes, in 1937, but was not written down until about the end of 1943.1 By the time when it came to be written it was obvious that there would be great difficulty in getting it published and it was refused by four publishers.2 Only one of these had any ideological motive. Two had been publishing anti-Russian books for years, and the other had no noticeable political color. One publisher actually started by accepting the book, but after making the preliminary arrangements he decided

Penguin’s 2000 edition of Animal Farm included the essay “The Freedom of the Press,” which was identified as “Orwell’s Proposed Preface to Animal Farm,” and dated 1945. The essay was first published in The Times Literary Supplement , September 15, 1972. You are reading a footnoted and elided version of that essay. By reading further, you risk participating in a crime; what I am doing here may be technically illegal. A version of this essay was originally published by The Believer. 1 I wrote Snowball’s Chance very quickly, in the three weeks following 9/11, 2001. Snowball comes back to the farm. Brings capitalism. 2 There was a feeding frenzy around 9/11. A New York editor who had just been given her own imprint—I am, in all seriousness, afraid to say who—was rumored to have come out of her office screaming, “This is a fucking goldmine we’re sitting on!” But where the market didn’t cap my agent’s enthusiasm, her lawyer did. I stupidly mentioned this to The New York Times , which detailed the equivocation in an article about Snowball that ran in the Arts Section. (Dinitia Smith. “A Pig Returns to the Farm, Thumbing His Snout at Orwell.” November 11, 2002.) Since then, the sentences about my literary agency have disappeared from the online version of the piece, which is shorter than the original.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Reed, The Never End, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_3

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to consult the Ministry of Information, who appear to have warned him, or at any rate strongly advised him, against publishing it. Here is an extract from his letter: I mentioned the reaction I had had from an important official in the Ministry of Information with regard to Animal Farm. I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think. ... I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time. If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right, but the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships. Another thing: it would be less offensive if the predominant caste in the fable were not pigs. I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offense to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are.3

This kind of thing is not a good symptom.4 Obviously, it is not desirable that a government department should have any power of censorship (except security censorship, which no one objects to in wartime).5 But the chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of the MOI or any official body.6 If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion.7 In this 3 The Orwell estate sent a letter to my publisher telling him not to publish Snowball. The lawyers are firmly against my releasing the letter, which I’d like to do, though I have to say it’s rather unremarkable. 4 An as of yet unexplored query: did Orwell, based on the rejection via the Ministry of Information, revise Animal Farm and/or his approach to publishers to re-market the premise as “addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large”? This premise was, ultimately, put forward by the Congress for Cultural freedom in its promulgation of the text: all revolutions are doomed to fail. 5 In our time, this exception, “National Security,” is justification for widespread, endemic censorship, and the relentless cropping of individual freedoms. 6 After my agent’s lawyer oinked his hesitations, I called James Sherry—and James and I were idealistic enough to try to get the book out with his small but reputable publishing house, Roof Books. In 2001, there were two major distributors. (Now, there’s only one.) The next-best option, Small Press Distribution (SPD), took on Snowball, where the book has been a longtime “bestseller.” But mainstream distribution brings a different set of numbers and can restock. We’d sold out bookstores before the publication date, and while the buyers at Barnes & Noble were delighted, they were also clapping their hands, saying finis. Deborah Thomas, James’ wife and the other publisher of Roof, was so disgusted she threw a few boxes of books into the trunk and drove to the B&N warehouse in New Jersey. The guys at the loading docks had never seen anything but giant trucks pull in. 7 That people were willing to live in a state of denial—ignoring war, ignoring injustice, ignoring tremendous threats to themselves, and even the planet—continually amazed Orwell, and he struggled with the cartography of complacency. In a 1945 “London Letter” to Partisan Review Orwell wrote, “In the face of terrifying dangers and golden political opportunities, people just keep on keeping on, in a sort of twilight sleep in which they

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country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face.8 Any fair-minded person with journalistic experience will admit that during this war official censorship has not been particularly irksome. We have not been subjected to the kind of totalitarian “co-ordination” that it might have been reasonable to expect. The press has some justified grievances, but on the whole the government has behaved well and has been surprisingly tolerant of minority opinions.9 The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary.10 are conscious of nothing except the daily round of work, family life, darts at the pub, exercising the dog, mowing the lawn, bringing home the beer, etc.” In his 1945 “Notes on Nationalism,” Orwell marveled at “the lunatic habit of identifying oneself with large power units.” And therein lies the answer to our twenty-first century state of denial. Our identities are under siege: advertising, education, the arts. We are built up and destroyed by lifestyles and categories (of race, of class, of culture) that exist primarily to contain, delimit, divide, and exploit the human experience. If there’s anything you think you need to buy to be who you are—whether it’s curtains from Ikea or a CD or a book or liposuction or take-your-pick—you don’t own yourself. 8 An Australian/UK publisher offered a healthy advance on Snowball ’s foreign rights. Snowball had significant press coverage in the UK and Australia. We didn’t collect the money before Christmas, and after the holiday, the deal was gone. The fear may have been, maybe rightly, that the coverage of the book was flash-in-the-pan—that there hadn’t been enough actual engagement with the content. The writer for The Telegraph read Snowball’s Chance, but other UK, Australian, and international news outlets weren’t so demanding. When I talked to the BBC , Christopher Hitchens as my opposition, Hitchens was open about not having read the book. In the United States, perhaps due to my hometown stature, there was only one well-published literary assessment by a writer who hadn’t read the book. Cathy Young’s “Blaming the Victim of Terrorism” appeared in The Boston Globe, December 2, 2002, and was cross-published, the same day, in Reason Magazine, as “Blaming the Victim: Progressives whitewash theocratic fascism.” 9 If this was true of World War II, our wars since 2002 have taken on a different model. Our present-day war coverage—fully embedded, fully cooperative—is subsidized, approved, in-tandem with government. A few characters on the far right may have complaints about specific incidents of press “leakage” (as they call it), but there’s little room for argument. The fundamental debate is whether or not we should trust government to oversee what information is made available to the public. The far right and the far left say no, while the center is more likely to say yes. Our present-day impression of Orwell is that he was an underground man waging a war of truth. The compelling critique of Orwell, 1945 and today, is that he was the pre-eminent spokesman of orthodox thinking, wearing the mask of a contrarian (Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Christopher Hitchens, etc.). In 1946, Randall Swingler, a poet who served in Italy during World War II (he was awarded the Military Medal of the British Army), published a response to Orwell’s “The Prevention of Literature.” While Swingler agreed with Orwell that a writer must “dare to be a Daniel,” he objected to Orwell’s broad sweeps and “intellectual swashbucklery.” Moreover, Swingler didn’t see Daniel in Orwell: “What in heaven is Orwell really worried about? He appears at the moment to be getting more space than any other journalist to report truthfully. … Orwell’s posture of lonely rebel hounded by monstrous pro-Soviet monopolists has a somewhat crocodile appearance.” 10 The marketplace is pinched and fashioned by the corporate psychologies that own distribution. Individuals are desperate to find inroads to distribution. They want to live in

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Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.A Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines-being kept right out of the British press, not because the government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that “it wouldn’t do” to mention that particular fact.11 So far as the “the warm spot,” and the overlords encourage them in the notion that if they subscribe to this or that, if they parrot certain ideas, they can partake. This cultural echo of corporate psychology is at the core of decision-making in, for example, the literary world, or, in another example, social media. The end result: editors, writers, etc. are consciously trying to conform to the demands of their audiences. Perhaps now, as in Orwell’s time, censorship is not a problem of compliance—people are not ordered, or not as a rule ordered to comply. The ogre of Orwell’s age was complacency; alas, the ogre of our age is more formidable—complicity. 11 When Snowball’s Chance came out, parody was not protected in the UK, and various legal actions, most notably against Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, a parody of Gone With the Wind, foretold the extinction of parody in the United States. With Mickey Mouse coming up for public domain, US copyright had been extended, arguably in perpetuity. Following the US administrations of the 80s, the Supreme Court was markedly conservative. Conventional wisdom: why should parody fare any better than copyright? In the end, conservatives embraced parody in their own tradition; the Supreme Court unanimously protected parody, and since 2002, the UK has taken steps to allow for parody, owing to the financial incentives of parody in entertainment, The Daily Show, etc. During the 2002/2003 discussion of Snowball and copyright, the “particular fact” that only one newspaper (The Portland Tribune) saw fit to mention is that Animal Farm is based on the story “Animal Riot,” which was written by the Russian historian Nikolai Kostomarov in 1879/1880, and published in 1917. Snowball’s Chance was published fiftyseven years after Animal Farm, while Animal Farm was published thirty-eight years after the publication of “Animal Riot.” In other words: the criticism of Snowball that cited copyright relied upon a logic that would have more aptly applied to Animal Farm, which was not a parody, but an elaboration of another author’s story. July 23, 1988, The Economist compared the two texts. A bull in “Animal Riot”:

Brother bulls, sisters and cow-wives. Esteemed beasts worthy of a better destiny than the one which inexplicably befell you and made you a slave of tyrant Man! The hour has come to cast of vile slavery and take revenge for all our ancestors tormented by work, starved and fed repulsive feed, who collapsed dead under whips and heavy carts, who were killed at slaughterhouses and torn to pieces by our tormentors. Rally with hooves and horns. Old Major in Animal Farm: Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength. … Why do we then continue in this miserable condition? Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labor is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word—Man.

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daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralized, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films, and radio. At any given moment, there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was “not done” to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.12 A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.13 12 One friend, a writer I quite respect, was so unwilling to entertain the idea that there was something wrong with his beloved Orwell that he hasn’t talked to me since I last saw him—he’d come to a reading of Snowball at Housing Works, 2002, without having known much about the book. On the flip side, I’ve met a few Orwell haters—but most people assess Snowball as I assess it myself; it’s a criticism of Animal Farm that Orwell would have welcomed. I do sense that there’s an “orthodox” line of reasoning about Snowball’s Chance that I’m not privy too—but perhaps that’s vainglorious. The current US orthodoxy is more concerned with consecration than consciousness. Major media has sole discretion to ordain existence—and it doesn’t need to defend its decision-making process. Anything deemed unorthodox is to be ignored without engagement, without regret: is to be presumed beneath contempt. Snowball, which was for whatever reasons was baptized with media birth, subsists in a half-life of half readers. I happen to know that in terms of units it’s just not very significant, and that the people who like it or don’t like it do so based on whether they deem themselves to be friend or foe of its political message. It’s a book that breaks my heart over and over; I can’t tell you how many people have told me they admired it—people who I swiftly discerned hadn’t read it. 13 In 2002, the preferred UK attack on Snowball was on the grounds of copyright. In the United States, the critique was a coupling of political polemics (Hitchens called me a “Bin Ladenist”), coupled with class clichés; I was a spoiled ivy league kid (Columbia University for my MFA); I was a painter who’d suddenly decided to try writing (my father is the painter); I was getting rich by publishing a pinko take-off of Animal Farm (I did not get rich). In 2012, the question of copyright infringement is a complete non-sequitur, not only because parody has been re-established as protected speech, but also because Animal Farm is available on the internet. Animal Farm is public domain in Australia, and the text has “illegally” made its way to countries where it is under copyright. If Snowball is a transgression of copyright, it is one among millions. In Marcus Warren’s take, “Animal Farm Parody ‘Exploits Orwell’” (November 27, 2002, The Telegraph) William Hamilton, Orwell’s literary executor, was quoted as saying: “If it were a straight parody, I would say ‘good on you’. But this book seems to take rather than give.” (The Telegraph’s internet archive of its coverage of Snowball, like The New York Times archive, is truncated.) That same criticism—that I’m taking more than I give—might well be leveled at this essay. To any who might accuse me of infringing copyright by publishing my elided and footnoted version of Orwell’s “The Freedom of the Press,” Google the search terms “George Orwell” + essay + “The Freedom of the Press” and count copyright infringements among the 138,000 results. As a concession to my own fallibility, I confess that I’m less uplifted by the internet availability of Snowball’s Chance—though perhaps it’s poetic justice that a version of the text has been downloaded in embarrassingly high numbers in Europe, particularly in the

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At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Hardly anyone will print an attack on Stalin, but it is quite safe to attack Churchill. Stalin is sacrosanct. The endless executions in the purges of 1936–1938 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicize famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in the Ukraine.14 But now to come back to this book of mine. The reaction toward it of most English intellectuals will be quite simple: “It oughtn’t to have been published.” Naturally, those reviewers who understand the art of denigration will not attack it on political grounds but on literary ones. They will say that it is a dull, silly book, and a disgraceful waste of paper. This may well be true, but it is obviously not the whole of the story. One does not say that a book “ought not to have been published” merely because it is a bad book. After former nations of the USSR. There’s been some confusion in those countries as to whether or not I’m the dead John Reed (the author of The Ten Days that Shook the World), who has been cut from my version of Orwell’s essay. All, I suppose, poetic justice. 14 Up to here, I’ve snipped a mere eighty-six words from Orwell’s essay. Nothing of consequence. This paragraph however—seventy-eight words as shown—was originally a three-paragraph, 1243-word section. Orwell, in the elided material (the full essay is available on the internet), discusses the hypocrisy of the English press, Stalin’s purges, the power of the Catholic Church, a biography of Stalin written by Trotsky, the Red Army, the Battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Lord Nelson, Colonel Mihailovi´c, Marshal Tito, The Daily Worker, The Catholic Herald, and other matters. Orwell’s critics—setting aside the question of the list of “crypto-Communists” Orwell handed over to the Information Research Department of the British Foreign Office—characterize Orwell as a half-hearted political thinker and a full-time Cold Warrior. Orwell, who did work with the Information Research Department as a propagandist, coined the term Cold War; Animal Farm was backed by the CIA and the British Foreign Office as an educational tool of the Cold War; 1984 was embraced by right wingers as an attack on socialism. Orwell was not happy about the latter, which is evidenced by his repeated attempts to redress the criticism. Personally, I find it impossible to believe that Orwell would have approved of the use of Animal Farm to demonize foreign nations and bludgeon independent thought. But that is how the book was used by the CIA and the British Secret Service, and Orwell was more than cooperative in disseminating the book with that end (Animal Farm, thanks to covert activity, was one of the most swiftly and broadly translated texts in the history of literature). The message of Animal Farm in US public schools: revolution is doomed to fail; the leadership of the pigs, who are smarter, is an evolutionary inevitability. T.S. Eliot, who passed on publishing Animal Farm, is often singled out for his shortsightedness. To credit Eliot, he hesitated at the fault that allowed Animal Farm to be heisted as propaganda after Orwell’s death. “The effect is simply one of negation,” wrote Eliot, “The book ought to excite sympathy with what the author wants, as well as with his objections.” Orwell’s wartime BBC acquaintance, William Empson, a poet and the author of Seven Types of Ambiguity (first published in 1930), warned Orwell that the “racial differences” of the farmyard espoused the birthright of a leadership class. “Your metaphor—the intellectual superiority of the pigs—suggests that the Russian revolution was a pathetically impossible effort to defy nature. You must expect to be ‘misunderstood’ about this book on a large scale.” In 1984, Orwell repeated the shortcoming—the overall effect of 1984 is one of helplessness and doom—allowing US conservatives to promote the message as anti-socialist.

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all, acres of rubbish are printed daily and no one bothers. The English intelligentsia, or most of them, will object to this book because it traduces their Leader and (as they see it) does harm to the cause of progress. If it did the opposite they would have nothing to say against it, even if its literary faults were ten times as glaring as they are.15 The issue involved here is quite a simple one: Is every opinion, however unpopular—however foolish, even—entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say “Yes.” But give it a concrete shape, and ask, “How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?” and the answer more often than not will be “No.” In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses.16 If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who “objectively” endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you. To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.17 ,B,C

Notes A. A complicating factor of the digital moment is the proliferation of outdated, deceptive, or misleading materials. That Orwell turned over lists of state enemies, or at the very least people who the state shouldn’t trust, should not be up for debate; he did. The number of names sprawls into the hundreds, or drops into the thirties. (The lower number may be more damnable, as these were the people Orwell deemed higher risk/high priority for state intervention, whether these figures be cautioned, monitored, ignored, blacklisted, or something else.) There’s a great deal of denial as to the known facts in this case, and the totality of the record is not known; we probably haven’t seen all the lists (there were many), and we probably don’t know the contexts of the lists we

15

The art of denigration may well be a lost art. In 2002, only one right-wing US critic, Arthur Salm of The San Diego Union Tribune, read Snowball’s Chance closely enough to deliver the clever, faint praise, “John Reed good, Orwell better.” Two reporters—who were working for venues that published critical views of Snowball —intimated to me that their copy was out of their control. Marcus Warren, the then New York correspondent for The Telegraph, told me on the phone that he liked the book, but that’s not what his higher ups were looking for. Rachel Donadio, now of The New York Times and then a reporter for the neoconservative New York Sun, repeatedly told me, live and on the phone, “I have a job to do.” 16 At this moment, I wouldn’t presume that conservative or liberal sectors would agree that every opinion is entitled to a hearing. 17

Since note #13, I have elided an additional 1459 words.

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do have. That layered with the various releases of the lists—what was known at this time as opposed to that time, etc.—and the general tendency of the internet to muddle everything, the picture we have of Orwell’s lists is almost impossibly confused. In the late 00s, I began to entertain the ambition to sort it all out, and in an entry of the Animal Farm “Timeline” I published earlier this year (The Paris Review), I presented, in summary, my best theory. Since then, my extended discussion of this theory, “A Few Names to be remembered with George Orwell,” has foundered. I drafted the piece in the 00s, revised it in 2013, and tried to brush it off again in 2017. It is a big story without a headline. I say as much in the drafted writing, which is very rough and lacking in confidence, and reproduced, flaws and all, here: In these early days of Oceania and doublethink and what Big Brother himself called the “malquotes” of the press, we’ve turned to Orwell. What did he say about the ways we lie to ourselves and each other? What did he say about history that had no facts? What did he say about who we become when we deny the things we’ve done, and deny the things that have been done in our names? For good reason, we’re all fixated on Orwell, who devoted himself, through literature, to these impossible quandaries. But our interest in Orwell is, curiously, also a testament to that which we fear: that our politics, our cultures, our narratives of ourselves, are, in their essence, self-deceptive, or, in the most generous light, avoidant. Big Brother was untouchable, and so, perhaps, is Donald Trump, and so, perhaps, is George Orwell. It was not by chance that I was introduced to the writings of Orwell; I attended public school in New York City the 1970s and 1980s, and with the vestigial arms of the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom still in operation, Orwell was presented to me in the manner of Saint George. For nearly three decades, the CIA had engaged with Russia in a cultural “Cold War,” the terminology of which was Orwell’s own coinage. Orwell was professionally tied to the Information Research Department, which would later morph into MI6; the IRD was charged with the British part of the soft war against the Russians, in which Orwell was an active part. Orwell, disgusted with Stalin and his atrocities, sided with the right in the post-World War II realignment of the allies. Animal Farm, which presented the failure of Communism in fable form, was the IRD’s greatest success; the slim volume was massively translated and distributed worldwide, and foisted on students like myself, in the form of the book as well as a film financed directly by the CIA, for the next forty years. Orwell’s compliance with government forces has been variously justified: he was at the end of his life and manipulated by attractive young women; he was wary of the right but believed their involvement was a necessary concession—Stalin was indeed a monster. Orwell’s early death engendered myriad mysteries, the most enduring of which is “Orwell’s list.” He turned over names to the IRD. Notes complimented the red-flagged communists: “Polish Jew,” “disappointed careerist,” “silly sympathizer,” “very slimy.” Those who made the list were for the most part people Orwell didn’t like personally, for reasons

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couched in not-endearing language. But it’s unclear to what extent the list damaged people, and what Orwell had intended by his collaboration, and to what degree Orwell was, as The Telegraph dubbed him in 1996, a “state informer.” The New York Review of Books seemingly had the last substantial word on the subject, a 2003 apologia, but more information has been declassified since. In 2012, I made a run at another Orwell mystery: the origin of Animal Farm. It had long been whispered that Orwell-based Animal Farm on a little-known short story, the title of which might be translated “Animal Riot,” by the Russian historian, Nikolai Kostomarov. The rumor was customarily pooh-poohed, but Orwell was someone who consulted sources. His analogs for 1984, for example, are well known: The Iron Heel by Jack London, We by Eugene Zamyatin, and Brave New World by Arthur Koestler, among others. Orwell looked at comparable titles in the same way he worked as a journalist; he had a significant discovery process and to excellent effect. In the words of pre-eminent Orwell biographer, Bernard Crick, Orwell “greatly improved and transcended” his borrowings. In the course of finding Kostomarov’s story, getting it translated into English, connecting the dots on how Orwell might have known about the story, I also assembled an Animal Farm timeline, which traced Kostomarov’s story as well as the use of Animal Farm by the CIA. (Which I wrote about in The Paris Review: “Animal Farm Timeline.”) It was my intention to follow up the “Animal Riot” piece (“Revisionist History,” published in Harper’s Magazine), with a piece that made sense of Orwell’s list, but I couldn’t quite sort it all out, and I soon realized I wasn’t the only one. To date, nobody has made sense of Orwell’s lists. The summary is this: Orwell turned over several lists to the IRD; there were at least two lists, one in a handwritten notebook of 135 names (some of these names were crossed out), and one in a typed document of thirty-eight names (it’s been reported that this list is thirty-five names, but the document is widely available online, and, if one counts the names, there are thirty-eight). The second list redacts the first. Some of the names are recognizable—Michael Redgrave, Martin Amis, Charlie Chaplin, Katherine Hepburn, and John Steinbeck—but the majority of the people named were Orwell’s literary contemporaries. Additionally, Crick, who broke the story in the 1980s, believed there was a list of eighty-six names, which is yet to be confirmed. And, finally, of the original list of 135 names, there are seven names that remain a “state secret.” Orwell’s tax collector, it is dismissively noted, made this exclusive list— but the more general takeaway is that the still unknown names mattered, that those on the more limited list paid a price during the Cold War. Was there an “A” list that has yet to be declassified? 86 + 38 only tallies to 124. But that’s conjecture. We just don’t know. Maybe there isn’t enough information out there to know. Or maybe we’ve made such a mess of what is there, that we will never log the evidence. With the declassifying of documents concerning the lists, and the declassification of documents

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concerning the covert efforts of the soft war, one would think our understanding would have progressed, but what has happened instead is a melding of informed and uninformed discussion. All the levels of unknowledge have been knotted into chaotic nonsense, which there has not been a collective effort to untangle, because some people, like Orwell, stand above the facts. In 1972, The Times Literary Supplement published Orwell’s essay “The Freedom of the Press.” In that piece, originally written in 1945 as a proposed preface to Animal Farm, Orwell made very clear that much of censorship, if not most of censorship, is self-directed, that we don’t talk about certain things “because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact.” And here we are, in 2017, looking at the president through the eyes of our saint, and wondering what happened to the truth. B. Case in point: From: Date: October 26, 2012 1:23:07 PM PDT To: Subject: Re: no seriously here it is Oy, sorry I’ve been sitting on this. It’s been nuts here. So my question is—is this actually illegal? I mean, I think so. We need to get permission from Penguin, it seems like, in order to print the Orwell part. I’m all for being cheeky and stuff and freedom of the press etc. but we don’t have the money to get sued for infringing their copyright. I just don’t have time to follow up with this; if to etc.? Sorry you’re super jaxxed on publishing will you look into it or ask this took forever. From: Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2012 18:58:07 -0700 To: Subject: legal stuff hey john, can you set our collective mind at ease about legal issues v/v your orwell piece? see below for a little more context from our managing editor. thanks! From: John Reed Date: Sun, 28 Oct 2012 10:49:59 -0500 To: Subject: Re: legal stuff Of course. The footnote on the subject says this: “Penguin’s 2000 edition of Animal Farm included the essay “The Freedom of the Press,” which was identified “Orwell’s Proposed Preface to Animal Farm,” and dated 1945. The essay was first published in The Times Literary Supplement , 15 September 1972. You are reading a footnoted and elided version of that essay. By reading further, you risk participating in a crime; what I am doing here may be technically illegal.”

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In fact, I’m being melodramatic. Orwell’s original essay is 4,000 words, and my elided version is about 1100, with 2,600 words of commentary, so just in terms of it being a critical essay, it’s fine. Point 2: Our essay is partly parodic, and in that, nearly impossible to squelch. See page 319: http://books.google.com/books?id=i4egPXh4OoEC&pg=PA319& lpg=PA319&dq=justice+souter+on+parody+copyright&source=bl&ots=VtQuGe W0AP&sig=jo1oAxlb2bhiYKAtOiEQAFaxFRU&hl=en&sa=X&ei=3j6NUIP3J M6q0AGSjICQAg&ved=0CEoQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=justice%20souter% 20on%20parody%20copyright&f=false. To quote here: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Ove rview/chapter9/9-b.html: “Less is more -- is not necessarily true in parody cases. A parodist is permitted to borrow quite a bit, even the heart of the original work, in order to conjure up the original work. That’s because, as the Supreme Court has acknowledged, “the heart is also what most readily conjures up the [original] for parody, and it is the heart at which parody takes aim.” (Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 US 569 (1994).)” That was Justice Souter, who delivered a verdict that superseded previous copyright law. Let me quote a bit more of Souter to give the context (CAMPBELL v. ACUFF-ROSE): “Even if 2 Live Crew’s copying of the original’s first line of lyrics and characteristic opening bass riff may be said to go to the original’s “heart,” that heart is what most readily conjures up the song for parody, and it is the heart at which parody takes aim. Moreover, 2 Live Crew thereafter departed markedly from the Orbison lyrics and produced otherwise distinctive music.” Point 3: As per the copyright on the essay, there’s no known copyright. The essay was originally published in 1972 without a copyright or any agreement with the author. Ian Angus found the typewritten essay, and Bernard Crick, the Orwell biographer, published it in the Times Literary Supplement. He included his own commentary. His model was similar to ours, but in all honesty, we’re being more conservative. Point 4: As per fair use, the following Google search returns 428,000 results: “The freedom of the press” orwell “full text”. In short, this essay is has already been widely reproduced. There’s no justification for singling out our highly truncated version (and critical, parodic version). Hey, this stuff is all of course what the essay is about. Can we make this email the final footnote? From: Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2012 15:19:21 -0800 To: John Reed Subject: Re: legal stuff thanks, the powers that are (sic) seem satisfied with this. the gears of the machine grind slowly back to work. From: John Reed

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Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2012 19:53:08 -0500 To: Daniel Becker Subject: Re: legal stuff . I appreciate your help here. Should I forward a new ha, many thanks version with the last email as the final footnote? From: Date: Fri, 16 Nov 2012 16:59:20 -0800 To: John Reed Subject: Re: legal stuff couldn’t hurt! C. From: Fri, Apr 19, 2013, 8:41 PM hi john, okay, i’ve done some snooping and bothering and it seems like our long international nightmare may be close to over. here are the fact-checking points hanging us up: . “Snowball had significant press coverage in the UK and Australia” . can you give us some sense of “significant”? (this is, i would argue, the least important point of all these.) . “An Australia/UK publisher offered a healthy advance on Snowball’s foreign rights” . can you substantiate this? . “The writer for the Telegraph read the book … when I talked to the BBC, Christopher Hitchens as my opposition, Hitchens was open about not having read the book” . our intern couldn’t find any record of this--do you have a transcript, recording, video, etc.? . “a version of the text has been downloaded in embarrassingly high numbers in Europe, particularly in former nations of the USSR” . can you confirm/substantiate? . “Hitchens called me a Bin Ladenist” . source? (see above) . “We’d sold out bookstores before the publication date … buyers at Barnes & Noble … Deborah Thomas … threw a few boxes of books into the trunk and drove to the B&N warehouse” i gather we reached out to some SPD people and they said they had no recollection of this but it didn’t seem like anyone would drive books to barnes and noble--can someone verify this? and some things that have been flagged as unverifiable, so i guess we just need some kind of email-affidavit that you’re prepared to stand behind them in case the other people in question turn out to be forgetful and litigious (it’s been a while since i’ve been a fact-checker, but an email confirmation ought to do): . . . .

“I called James Sherry” “Marcus Warren, then the New York correspondent…” “Rachel Donadio, now of the New York Times…” “my father is the painter”

2013: GEORGE ORWELL’S “FREEDOM OF THE PRESS,” …

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and i think (i hope) that should do it. i know this is a little much as far as due diligence goes, but we’re generally timorous about lawsuits, which we can in no way afford, so the feeling seems to be better safe (and late) than sorry (or never). thanks in advance for your assistance & let me know if you have any questions. John Reed 4/19/13 to ha holy moly, I’d given up on you. now it’s six martinis. but let’s spread them out. ok: “a version of the text has been downloaded in embarrassingly high numbers in Europe, particularly in former nations of the USSR” can you confirm/substantiate? I’m sending you the email. I happened upon this when I made the mistake of searching download snowball’s chance for free. We’d just started talking to melville house, and the results were so horrific we decided to just forget about it. Who the hell knows what the numbers mean, but they were high. The full text is in fact free on the internet. But I’m afraid to look at it closely. I’m forwarding the last email I sent to James Sherry about it. Ok, I looked it up again. That site is dead, but it’s still on the torrents. Have your intern adjust their search settings to russian: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AfbG_Lu3j Lw#! “snowball’s chance” torrents

It’s out there in english too: http://www.torrenthound.com/hash/986924503dd2e4e8553071e7cf2c02 190045861f/torrent-info/snowballs-chance-by-John-Reed-ebook-cpdl. http://www.torrentdownloads.me/torrent/1081574/snowballs+chance+ by+John+Reed+(ebook)%5Bcpdl%5D. http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/6037/Snowballs-Chance-by-John-Reedeboobcpdl. http://www.btscene.org/details/1730906/snowballs+chance+by+John+ Reed.html. http://kat.ph/snowballs-chance-by-john-reed-ebook-cpdl-t2947854.html. http://www.picktorrent.com/download/af/3473309/snowballs-chanceby-john-reed-(ebook)[cpdl]/ “Snowball had significant press coverage in the UK and Australia” can you give us some sense of “significant”? (this is, i would argue, the least important point of all these.)

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Telegraph (twice), Scotsman, BBC (Twice), Australia’s The Age (I think it’s called). UK wire service and India. We were all over the radio too. They hated me! Loved it. A library search or even a Google news search or a newspaper search would turn all of this up. Search UK as well as US papers. “The writer for the Telegraph read the book … when I talked to the BBC, Christopher Hutchens as my opposition, Hitchens was open about not having read the book” our intern couldn’t find any record of this--do you have a transcript, recording, video, etc.? He said this on the BBC, and maybe to the New York Sun. This was 2002. It’s not like this happened when everything was digital, but the radio interview was on the internet until recently. He definitely said this. At worst, we should get the transcript from the BBC. Google may be insufficient. “Hitchens called me a Bin Ladenist” Same interview. This was on the BBC. The interview was on the internet until recently. He definitely said this. It’s been cited continuously since 2002. “We’d sold out bookstores before the publication date ... buyers at Barnes & Noble ... Deborah Thomas ... threw a few boxes of books into the trunk and drove to the B&N warehouse” i gather we reached out to some SPD people and they said they had no recollection of this but it didn’t seem like anyone would drive books to barnes and noble--can someone verify this? SPD is in California. The warehouse is in New Jersey. The publisher drove The books were in the books out there: Deborah Thomas her trunk. “I called James Sherry” James Sherry “Marcus Warren, then the New York correspondent…” Would “Marcus Warren in New York” cover it? Yes. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/search/?queryText=%22By%20Marcus%20W arren%20in%20New%20York%22&version= “Rachel Donadio, now of the New York Times…” She was with the Sunday Books section until 2008. Now she’s in Rome: http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/d/rachel_ donadio/index.html. “my father is the painter” He’s a well-known painter, to people who know about such arcana. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reed_%28artist%29.

2015: Revisionist History: The Origin of Animal Farm (Was a Little-Known Story, “Animal Riot,” by Russian/Ukrainian Scholar Nikolai Kostomarov) December 17, 2015

His mother was a country girl; his father was a military captain, not wealthy, but he owned land, plenty of it, and his income was steady and ample. Then, a tragedy, and his father was lost, his income all but lost, and he was left with little but his mind and his middling education. Still, he distinguished himself in his small-town classroom, and through academic merit and aristocratic pity, found his way to a schooling more befitting his father’s rank. If he, a boy from a family fallen on hard times, could never be entirely at home in the society of his betters, neither was he entirely an outsider. He was not the very rich, but he was not the very poor. And so, after a failed stint at teaching school, he sprung forth a young radical, ready, and willing to uplift the masses. He wrote to a friend: Why is it that all the history books talk about the extraordinary historical characters, and occasionally about laws and institutions, but at the same time ignore the lives of the masses of ordinary people? The poor peasant, the working farmer, as it were, does not exist in history. Why does history not tell us about his way of life, his spiritual world, his feelings, and the means by which he expresses his happiness and his sadness? … History must be studied not only from dead chronicles and writings, but also among living people.

A writer’s life was hardscrabble, but after a decade, he reached an uncomfortable detente with the establishment, and from there rose to an elevated status. People trusted him; his work met a standard of truth at no compromise, of “strict, relentless truth.”

A version of this essay was originally published by Harper’s Magazine. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Reed, The Never End, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_4

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While his professional life flourished, he struggled with his personal life. His health failed him—he had always been sickly—and his romantic appeals were a pitiable picaresque of his throwing himself at any young woman who showed a disposition to his literary talent—a parade of marriage proposals, dramatic rebuffs, and tragedy. Finding solace and identity in his writing, he championed the underclasses. Beyond the strictures of class barriers, he envisioned a more cooperative world—the good life for all. He was variously nationalistic and independent, writing on a panoply of subjects, and adopting a byline that bespoke a lone voice of reason, as willing to eschew or advance the prevalent position, i.e., the orthodoxy. Inspired by the countryside that evoked his childhood and his nation, his midlife masterpiece was a simple parable of a revolution gone wrong: a farm animal uprising with a dire moral concerning the futility of all revolutions. It was a terrible prophecy, but the story would endure well beyond his all-toobrief sojourn in this life, which strained under the burden of his perspicacity. With advancing years came disenchantment, and he exchanged grievances with a correspondent: You write to me that we are all unfortunate. Understandably so, and no political or social speculations can correct that because we are created so that our lives are unhappy. … Is it possible that you still believe in some kind of utopia? Is it possible that you imagine that human society will transform itself into some kind of happy community? … That is all a dream. Man essentially suffers, just as he has suffered and will suffer. … Speaking of myself personally, I am very unhappy. I feel that I am growing old and there is nothing to replace youth. Life is boring, and I see emptiness in the future.

But this ashen core, this ember, was tended, fanned, by the constancy of literary esteem; he was a dark star, ever rising. And, accordingly, a young woman acquiesced to his feverish proposal of marriage. For her, he fought his way to apparent health, physical and psychological, but he overextended himself, leaving his bride a widow, albeit an active widow; in her twenty-three remaining years of life, she saw twenty volumes of his work to publication. By now, the name of the author is at your lips, as is the title of his parable, the “little squib” that’s haunted English departments of grade school, middle school, and high school ever since—a story, indeed, that is the subject of this essay. Orwell, yes. But, no. The author is Nikolai Kostomarov, and the little squib isn’t Animal Farm, it’s “Animal Riot.” 2001. I blamed George Orwell for 9/11. I mean, I didn’t, not exactly, but in the two weeks that followed 9/11, I wrote a rejoinder to Animal Farm. I’d grown up downtown, lived downtown—plastic covered the vents and windows to keep out the dust of the Towers—and I was taken with the hypothetical: what if Snowball returned to

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the farm, and brought capitalism? Or, brought to the Manor Farm, should I say, the top-heavy oligarchy we call “capitalism.” In public school, my years of NYC public school (not the same as Eric Blair’s public school, so denotative of the UK ruling class), Animal Farm had been used to teach that revolution, all revolution, was doomed to fail—that this was the nature of humanity. Orwell had feared that Animal Farm would be appropriated to this message—and Orwell wasn’t alone. The threat was to all independent thinking, and T.S. Elliot, as far to the right as Orwell was to the left, rejected the manuscript of Animal Farm because he worried that the pigs were too smart in comparison to the other animals, that Orwell had inadvertently modeled a defense of complacency. My instinct, 2001, was to attack Orwell as emblematic of the “Cold War,” which was indeed a term he coined. Orwell’s late career writing, Animal Farm and 1984, had been massively supported by the CIA and the British Secret Service; Animal Farm may well have been the most aggressively distributed act of propaganda in post-World War II history. One could argue that Orwell must be held accountable: no excuses. Or one could prevaricate: Orwell thought he could outwit the British Secret Service and the CIA, gaining a massive audience for a work that said something they didn’t think it said. Regardless, Orwell died, and the CIA and British Secret Service proceeded unimpeded, and the bargain sealed, alas, was a Faustian one. (I put together a timeline of Animal Farm and the CIA for The Paris Review, which is another organization backed at its inception by the CIA: that timeline is also included, and expanded, in this collection.) The Animal Farm of the CIA doesn’t apply to just the Russian revolution; it’s a parable, a “timeless” parable, a “universal” parable, about the dangers of systemic change. My response, my book, Snowball’s Chance, was a small project. But with some fortuity—the Orwell estate threatened to sue us, Orwell’s lists (he wrote enemy lists for the British Secret Service) saw a resurgence of media attention, the far right and the far left found Snowball’s Chance to be offensive—I was called into the cicada chorus of the Orwell debate. In prepping for one of my stints as leftist effigy (for the BBC etcetera), I came across an acknowledged but little discussed source to Animal Farm. I was already versed in the de facto sources of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Heart of a Dog (1925) and Vladimir Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug (1929), which dated to the years of Orwell’s political and literary education and were allegories of the Russian Revolution and Russian culture/society. But there was a beast fable forerunner in the Russian tradition of satire and allegory that was more precise and precedential. In Nikolai Kostomarov’s 1879 story, “Animal Riot,” the animals of a country manor rise up against their despot, the farmer, and take control. I investigated, but this was 2002, before web translators and searchable books, and the scope of a full-fledged inquiry discouraged me. In 2012, with a tenth anniversary edition of Snowball’s Chance coming out, I was back in my notes, and I found a few partial translations of the story, and a full very rough translation that had been rendered for creative, not historical

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purposes, so I located the original Kostomarov story in Russian, and had it newly, exactingly rendered into English by Tanya Paperny. (That translation is also included in this collection.1 ) As I began to put out preliminary feelers, Russian scholars had a surprising reaction. Their attitude was a shrug of the shoulders, “Of course it is Russian, we all know it is based on this story.” To them, the headline was twentieth century. Not so in English, however, where the party line was “don’t bother”: Orwell didn’t read or speak Russian; Orwell was a minor historian who couldn’t possibly have heard of Kostomarov; Kostomarov’s story was more minor than Kostomarov himself; if “Animal Riot” were a source for Animal Farm, Orwell would have had no reason to keep it a secret; and, finally, Orwell was clear about the inspiration for Animal Farm and we know it had nothing to do with Kostomarov. Wrote Orwell: On my return from Spain, I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages. However, the actual details of the story did not come to me for some time until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.

The quote comes from the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm.2 Kostomarov, according to the entry “Ukraine: Historical and Cultural Study” in The Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era,3 was one of “the three founders of the Ukrainian national renaissance.” Kostomarov was also the favorite scholar of Mykhailo Hrushevsky, a Ukrainian author and political leader who was at the forefront of revolutionary Ukraine, a subject Orwell wrote about. Kostomarov, in Hrushevsky’s evaluation, was “the precursor of modern Ukraine.” So, it’s somewhat ironic that this quote in this introduction is the evidence that Orwell came up with Animal Farm independent of Kostomarov. And there is the bonus irony that this bottlecap origin story isn’t original; it’s a rehash of a scene from The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky.4 And, notably, the quote does not address Kostomarov at all. Orwell doesn’t say he didn’t know about Kostomarov. He just doesn’t mention it. 1 The translation of “Animal Riot” was a huge lift, but there’s yet another heroic act of translation that awaits someone: Bunt by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (serialized in 1922, published as a book in 1924, and now public domain). The short novel may have also had a part in the origin of Animal Farm. 2

Also: “The Freedom of the Press,” 1945/72.

3

Edited By Christopher John Murray. Routledge, 2003.

4

Was Orwell being clever? “Karamazov” as “Kostomarov.”? The Dostoevsky scene is noted and reproduced in “Pigs, Goats, Tea Parties, Walking Magnets & Scotch Central,” included in this collection.

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As I’ve written about in The Believer, Orwell was well apprised of this method of burying information, this censorship of “what it just won’t do to talk about.” As Orwell is often quoted (though the source is fittingly unknown at this time): “The omission is the most powerful form of lie, and it is the duty of the historian to ensure that those lies do not creep into the history books.” An example? The titular year of 1984 was not something that Orwell claimed as original, but neither did he claim otherwise. Pyotr Struve, Orwell’s translator and lead cheerleader, has filled in the details for us: 1984 was a transposition of 1948, the year the book was published. But Struve’s story is a rebuttal; the year 1984 appeared previously in works of dystopian fiction. Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), a novel that Orwell praised5 and one of the many known influences on 1984, features the year; also, the 1920 story/novella, “The Journal of my Brother Alexei to the Land of Peasant Utopia,” by the Russian writer A.V. Chayanov (writing under the pseudonym of Botanik X), is set in 1984. R.E.F Smith, in The Russian Peasant 1920 and 1984,6 elaborates on Orwell’s possible connections to Chayanov, which are simultaneously amorphous and probable. As I set out to map Orwell’s connections to Kostomarov, I found myself in a similar circumstance. The first criticism of my thesis— “Animal Riot” as the inspiration for Animal Farm—is that Orwell didn’t read or speak Russian. But Orwell did read in English and French, and if the Russian constructions in 1984’s Newspeak are any indication, he had at minimum rudimentary Russian. Next objection: Orwell couldn’t have known about Kostomarov because Kostomarov is an unknown. And the answer to that assertion is endless and myriad because it’s incorrect. Kostomarov was one of the most prolific writers of his time. His output was massive; he was a Harold Bloom, an Edgar Allen Poe. From the perspective of history, the arts and socialism—Orwell’s subjects—Kostomarov was one of the most significant Russian minds of the mid to late nineteenth century, a period that would have been the wellspring of Orwell’s schooling and university education. Here, I take my own research as an example; Kostomarov has been present and is remembered in every direction I’ve explored, and I’m an American in the twenty-first century, nearly one hundred years after Orwell arrived on the scene. A quick internet search on Kostomarov can be scattered, because there’s a lack of consistency of to-English translations of Kostomarov’s name. I’ve seen: Nikolay Kostomarov, Nikolay Ivanovich Kostomarov, Nikolai Kostomarov, and Mykola Kostomarov. But that’s a poor excuse for the assertion that Kostomarov was unknown—a justification by ignorance. To quote Thomas M. Prymak’s 1996 biography, Mykola Kostomarov 7 : “He was the foremost representative of the so-called populist school of Russian 5 “A Very Remarkable Prophecy of the Rise of Fascism.” Orwell, the Lost Writings. Arbor House, 1985. Also in Complete Works. Dated to 1943. 6

Routledge, 1977.

7

University of Toronto Press.

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historians, who put the nation or ‘the people’ (‘narod’) at the center of their story and relegated princes and stars to a secondary place.” Kostomarov was a foundational thinker of literary and revolutionary Russia; his humanism, his interest in common people, and his exuberant and cantankerous persona are the stuff of Gorky, Pushkin, Mayakovsky, and, in turn, Jack London, Aldous Huxley, Arthur Koestler (Koestler’s Darkness at Noon 8 is another source for 1984), and the whole trajectory of a people’s history. Kostomarov was not minor, and precisely in keeping with Orwell’s oeuvre from 1917 until Orwell’s death in 1950. And through the decades particularly apropos to this inquiry—the 20s and the 30s—a Russian/English exchange proliferated in conversation and translation to a degree not known before or since. Kostomarov’s attitude toward history and truth is so similar to Orwell’s as to render the two authors indistinguishable. To quote Kostomarov’s essay, “The Creation of Ukrainian Ethnic Identity” (as translated in David Saunders’ 2001 essay, “Mykola Kostomarov’’9 ): A historian must not dare to say in his historical works something that, in conscience, he considers incompatible with the truth, however necessary it appears to be for the good of the ruler to whom he has sworn loyalty or the honor of the country he acknowledges as his fatherland.

And here, it’s difficult to set aside the similarities in the biographies of Orwell and Kostomarov. How could Orwell not find some spark of interest in a man whose worldview and life bore so many similarities to his own? Even the strange details of Kostomarov’s childhood suggest Orwell’s sympathies. Orwell’s father was absent for much of his childhood, and Orwell’s later politics made for contention in whatever relationship was left; Kostomarov’s father was murdered by the house servants, and Kostomarov dedicated his talents to voicing the unspoken interior of the underclasses. (Via “Animal Riot,” the murder of Kostomarov’s father may well be the real-life incident behind the animal insurrection in Animal Farm.) Did Orwell read materials that mentioned Kostomarov? For years, I worked toward an answer, getting no closer to assessing how large an answer that merits; every new research trip, every new internet search, bore new information, new likelihoods, and even without going to London, Paris, and Russia, I staggered under the sierra of evidence that said he did. A few of the authors linked to Kostomarov who we know Orwell read and referenced: Taras Shevchenko, Aleksandr Pushkin, Leo Tolstoy, Karl Marx, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Mykhailo Hrushevsky, Maxim Gorky, Aleksander Blok, and Osip Mandelstam. Key points: 8 9

Macmillan, 1940.

“Mykola Kostomarov (1817–185) and the Creation of a Ukrainian Ethnic Identity.” Slavonica.

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. Immediately after Kostomarov’s death in 1885, his collected writings were published and the first biographies appeared. “Animal Riot,” dated to 1879, was published or republished in 1917, on the occasion of Russia’s February Revolution, by Niva. According to Wikipedia 12/3/14: “Niva was the most popular magazine of late nineteenthcentury Russia.” (Some sources cite 1917 as the first publication of “Animal Riot,” but the full publication history of the story is lost, and we know that an English language version of the story was discussed in the late nineteenth century, and it seems unlikely that a magazine would choose or would know to choose an unknown 45-year-old work to commemorate the Russian Revolution; rather, an editor knew of the story and remembered it.) With the end of the tsarist regime and tsarist censorship, interest in Kostomarov surged, and the years following saw new biographies and more extensive compilations of his writings. But as a critic of Russian nationalism and icons, and as a supporter of Ukraine’s separate cultural identity, Kostomarov, through the 20s, fell athwart the ideals of communist Russia, and until the death of Stalin, Kostomarov was on the outs with communist and socialist ideology (which could well be intriguing to Orwell). . Orwell worked in the London bookstore, Booklover’s Corner, from 1934–1935. His girlfriend of the time, Kay Ekevall, remembered to the BBC : “it was ‘have you read this’ and ‘do you like’ so and so … that kind of thing.” Then and now, Kostomarov is listed in every major dictionary of Russian literature. To recall The Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850, Kostomarov is one of the three “most prominent” members of Ukrainian Romanticism, and “founders of the Ukrainian national renaissance.” One of the other three was Taras Shevchenko. . Taras Shevchenko, who Kostomarov translated into English, was Ukraine’s premiere poet, and Orwell was likely to have read him. English to Russian, Kostomarov translated, among many others, Byron and Shakespeare (the full list of works he translated, a long list, has not yet been digitized). . Literary history pairs Kostomarov’s novel The Son: a Story from the Times of the Seventeenth Century with Aleksander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter. Likewise, Kostomarov’s influential work, The Revolt of Stenka Razin, was seen as an auger of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Karl Marx was interested in the uprising of Stephan Razin, and wrote a synopsis of Kostomarov’s historical biography. The Revolt of Stenka Razin was still discussed and relevant in 1935, and we know that Orwell read and studied Marx; he named his dog Marx. (Marx/Orwell is well-traversed territory, for example: Phillip Bounds’ Orwell and Marxism, St Martin’s Press, 2009.) Also, as Orwell wrote in a 1945 letter,10 “Marx wrote

10

Edited by Peter Davison. George Orwell: A Life in Letters. Liveright, 2013.

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some excellent criticism of Shakespeare,” via the translations of, in all probability, Kostomarov, Russian to English. . Tolstoy was a friend, colleague, collaborator, and neighbor of Kostomarov. Tolstoy wrote about Shakespeare, reading Kostomarov’s translations. Tolstoy on Shakespeare was one of Orwell’s subjects: Orwell dedicated himself to the subject in a 1941 BBC talk, “Tolstoy and Shakespeare,” as well as a 1947 essay “Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool.” (Robert Peace explored the territory, and ties to Animal Farm, in his 1998 essay, “Orwell, Tolstoy, and Animal Farm.”) The mid-30s recur; it’s Orwell’s origination date for Animal Farm, as well as the date of Hrushevsky’s death, as well as the period that Orwell worked in a used bookstore. It’s also the publication date, 1934, of E.J. Dillon’s Count Leo Tolstoy, in which two letters are reproduced from correspondence between writer and editor Emilie Mikhailovitch, and Vladimer Tchertkoff, Tolstoy’s editor and a leading Tolstoyan. Writes Tcertkoff in March 1891: In a short while I intend to send, if you like for a translation and publication in England, the story of our famous satirist, Kostomarov, written by him from an ancient legend of Little Russia—and some years ago worked on and perfected by L.N. Tolstoy ‘who gave to it quite a new and original ending’—but it has not once been permitted in Russia by the Censor. This story has wonderful spiritual force and is very sensational—for it depicts a sorrowful characteristic of Russian life. It must be signed thus: written by Kostomarov and Leo Tolstoy. As soon as it is copied I will send it to you.

Later the same month, Tcertkoff follows up: The story of Kostomarov and Tolstoy, which is being copied for you, will be ready shortly. I am not sending it to you yet because one of these days I await a reply from Tolstoy about his consent to the publication abroad of the piece. Without his consent I cannot give you the manuscript for this purpose, the more so that the widow of Kostomarov is still alive, and therefore only Tolstoy himself can decide whether it is now convenient to publish this work. But I expect that he will consent on condition that the book contain a short explanatory preface, which I will write.

While the history of the Tolstoy/Kostomarov story is not known at this time, and the text, tragically, is unaccounted for, it is indicated by Tcertkoff that “Animal Riot” was not insignificant, but banned. This represents, not conjecture, but a prevailing summation; Dillon’s biography was published by Hutchinson & Co. in London, a major publisher (publishing H.G. Wells, an Orwell mentor, influence, and enemy) that was active in the Russia/England political conversation, and would later publish works by and concerning Orwell.

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And there’s a second provenance to Orwell/Kostomarov: the early 20s, when Chayanov wrote his 1984 dystopia, Gorky published “On the Russian Peasantry,” and Hrushevsky published his 1925 essay about Kostomarov (and neither is 1917 and the Niva publication of “Animal Riot” too far from 1920). In his discussion of Chayanov’s influence on 1984, R.E.F Smith ponders the oral and personal culture that might have brought Chayanov’s work to Orwell’s attention: Chayanov himself … appears to have been in England in 1922. Again under the pseudonym of Botanik X he published “The Venetian Mirror, or the wondrous adventures of the glass man” [1923]; this, too, has passages reminiscent of the Utopia and bears the subscription at the end of the text, “London, 1922.” It is no more than speculation, but it is not totally inconceivable that Chayanov spoke of his 1984 utopia to English friends and that this date survived in oral tradition.

Smith also points out that Chayanov overlapped with Eugene Zamyatin,11 and the two may have known each other “from as early as 1912,” and in that regard, Orwell’s knowledge of Chayanov and/or his utopia may have come from an oral or written association with Zamyatin. Zamyatin’s We, it happens, was originally published in 1923 (more early 20s). Smith notes that all of this is speculative, or would be, were it not that Orwell assiduously researched his subjects. Orwell’s fieldwork was deployed with military efficiency. To quote Orwell biographer Bernard Crick on 1984: “It is authentic as a plausible nightmare that has haunted us ever since, more than any other of the anti-Utopias of this century whether by Wells, London, Huxley or Zamyatin, from all of whom Orwell borrowed, but greatly improved and transcended.”12 Add to that list, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, and the possible titular source of Chayanov’s 1984. Orwell brought his journalistic consciousness to the preparatory stages of his novels. All of Orwell’s bookform projects have near ancestors; Down and Out (1933), for example, is sibling to Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1903), while London’s The Iron Heel is Crick’s reference in relation to 1984. And, coincidentally, the full list of 1984’s sources brings us back to Mandelstam, Zamyatin, and Pyotr Struve. Gleb Petrovich “Pyotr” Struve (1898–1985) was a poet, translator, professor, and “literary man,” as Orwell would have phrased it. (Struve was also a friend and colleague of Vladimir Nabokov.) Born in St. Petersburg,

11

Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin. Isaac Deutscher, in his essay “The Mysticism of Cruelty,” observes that Orwell “borrowed the idea of 1984, the plot, the chief characters, the symbols, and the whole climate of the story, from Evgeny Zamyatin’s We.” Deutscher’s conclusion is cited in Frances Stoner Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War (The New Press, 1999), as well as in Corruptions of Empire by Alexander Cockburn (Verso Books, 1988). 12

George Orwell: A Life. Little Brown, 1981.

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Struve proceeded from a professorship at London University to a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he specialized in Slavic Languages and Literature. He authored over 900 articles in literary and academic journals; his subjects were those of this very inquiry: “Osip Mandelstam and Auguste Barbier”; “Nadezhda Mandelstam’s ‘Hope Abandoned’”; “Anti-Westernism in Recent Soviet Literature”; and “Alexander Turgenev, Ambassador of Russian Culture.” He also authored a shelf of books, which included: Russian Literature Under Lenin and Stalin, 1917–1953; Russian Literature in Exile; Soviet Russian Literature: 1917–1950; and A Century of Russian Prose and Verse: from Pushkin to Nabokov. Orwell and Struve first made their acquaintance at the end of World War II, when Orwell was returning from Germany, where he had been reporting for The Observer. Later, Struve would become a supporter of Animal Farm, translating the work himself. Later yet, after Orwell’s death, Struve would spokesperson for Orwell at events and symposiums, etcetera. The bulk of their extant correspondence is currently divided between the Orwell archive at the University of London, and the Struve archive at Stanford. The letters are unaggregated and higgelty-piggelty digitized, and the alliance of the two men—their friendship and collaboration—hasn’t been chronicled. Nevertheless, the exchange evinces Orwell’s aggressive process of discovery, and three of the available letters stand out. February 17, Orwell wrote to Struve, thanking him for an inscribed copy of Struve’s Twenty-five Years of Soviet Russian Literature.13 Orwell further asks after We, by Zamyatin, and in response, Struve will soon send him a version in French, which Orwell will read. Orwell goes on to ask about Aleksander Blok, who I noted that Mandelstam regarded as heavily influenced by Kostomarov. Orwell sources translated fragments of Blok’s work to the journal Life and Letters 14 ; the journal carries the title that will one day be borrowed for Orwell’s own collection of ephemera, in which the letter of February 17, 1944 is included. (Precisely at this moment, late 1943, early 1944, Orwell was writing Animal Farm.) Dear Mr. Struve, Please forgive me for not writing earlier to thank you for the very kind gift of Twenty-five Years of Soviet Russian Literature, with its still more kind inscription. I am afraid I know very little about Russian literature and I hope your book will fill up some of the many gaps in my knowledge. It has already roused my interest in Zamyatin’s We, which I had not heard of before. I am interested in that kind of book, and even keep making notes for one myself that may get 13 14

The inscription is not known at this time. Routledge, 1944.

Very likely volume 5 of Life and Letters (1930), which published a work of literary biography, “Alexander Blok.”

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written sooner or later. I wonder whether you can tell if there is an adequate translation of Blok? I saw some translated fragments about ten years ago in Life and Letters, but whether they were any good as a translation I do not know. I am writing a little squib which might amuse you when it comes out, but it is so not O.K. politically that I don’t feel certain in advance that anyone will publish it. Perhaps that gives you a hint of its subject. Yours sincerely Geo. Orwell

The letter of February 17 is also noteworthy in that the first known reference to 1984 is made in the same sentence that Orwell discloses his interest in Zamyatin’s We, and, of course, famously, “the little squib” at the end of the letter is Animal Farm. Jumping to four years later in the correspondence, two similar letters (the first of which, as far as I know, has not been reproduced in book form) stay the course on Zamyatin and progress from Blok to Mandelstam, via Mandelstam’s “sketches,” which is a work that Struve sent or delivered to Orwell, hoping to find a publisher for, one assumes, his own translation from the Russian. Orwell also inquires after “The Islanders,” Zamyatin’s “satire on England.”15 Perhaps Orwell was considering an analogous work, or wanted to view the work in the context of 1984, which Struve would until his death maintain was a misunderstood satire. In 1947, Orwell had treated the subject in “The English People,” an essay he refused to reprint because it was “silly” “propaganda.” Ward 3 Hairmyres Hospital East Kilbride Lanarkshire (Scotland) 25 February 1948 Dear Struve, I’m sorry to say that I haven’t been able to do anything with these sketches— a pity, but as you know we’re not well off in magazines in England now, and also I’m incapacitated being tied to my bed. I’ve been ill since about last November. It is TB, not, I imagine very dangerous, but enough to keep me very sick and 15 “The Islanders,” which satirized the English bourgeoisie way of life, was published in Russia in late 1917. The introduction to The Complete Works of George Orwell: Smothered Under Journalism (Secker & Warburg, 1946, edited by Ian Angus, Peter Hobley Davison, Sheila Davison) speculates on the early fate of “The Islanders” in English translation: “The satire on England which Orwell refers to is a longish short story called ‘The Islanders,’ a bitingly satirical picture of English smugness and philistinism. … It was translated into English but was turned down by publishers because of its ‘anti-English’ bias”.

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helpless for a long time. I’ve now having the new drug streptomycin, which it appears is marvelous for this disease, so I hope I may be out and about again by this summer. Of course I have done almost no work for three months or more. You asked about Burmese Days. If obtainable at all, it would be in the Penguin edition. I can never get hold of a copy myself, but the Penguin people occasionally send me an account, so I suppose the book is in print. It’s not being printed in England til 1949, but I believe Harcourt Brace are going to reissue it in the USA, when I’m not quite certain. They were asses not to do so immediately after I’d had that bit of luck with Animal Farm but American publishers don’t seem to like doing reprints. If I can manage to get hold of We when it comes out I’ll try to do a long review of it for somebody. The above address will find me for the time being, but my permanent addresses are the London one and Barnhill, Isle of Jura, Argyllshire. Yours sincerely, Geo. Orwell Ward 3 Hairmyres Hospital East Kilbride Lanarkshire (Scotland) 21 April 1948 Dear Struve, I’m awfully sorry to have to send this back, after such a long delay, having finally failed to find a home for it. But as you see by the above, I am in hospital (tuberculosis) & at the time of receiving your letter I wasn’t able to do very much. I am better now, & hope to get out here some time during the summer, but of course the treatment of this disease is always a slow job. I have arranged to review We for the Times Lit. Supp. when the English translation comes out. Did you tell me that Zamyatin’s widow is still alive & in Paris? If so, & she can be contacted, it might be worth doing so, as there may be others of his books which some English publisher might be induced to take, if We is a success. You told me that his satire on England, “The Islanders,” had never been translated, & perhaps it might be suitable. I hope you will forgive me for my failure to find an editor for Mandelstam’s sketches. There are so few magazines in England now. Polemic dies of the usual disease, & the other possible one, Politics & Letters, was no good. You asked about my novel, Burmese Days. I think it is still in print as a Penguin, but there won’t be many copies left. It is being reprinted about the end of this year, as I am beginning a uniform edition, & that is second on the list. I may succeed in getting some of these books reprinted in the USA as well. Yours sincerely Geo. Orwell PS. This address will find me for some months, I’m afraid.

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Why are these two letters so similar? Perhaps Orwell thought the first of the letters hadn’t been delivered? Or perhaps in his illness he was repeating himself? The purport is clear enough: Orwell is chasing a list of works by Russian authors, and he is aided by Struve in kind for Orwell’s assistance in furthering Struve’s translating endeavors, which are the objects of Struve’s passion and profession. To that end, Orwell did review the English translation of We,16 not in The Times Literary Supplement but the Tribune. (Struve wrote about and translated works by Zamyatin, who was within Struve’s area of expertise as an author and a lecturer.) Orwell’s review of We was, hmm, a mixed review, in which he pointed out “that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World must be partly derived from it … the resemblance with Brave New World is striking.” More than anything else, the review is a critique of Brave New World,17 which would inevitably be the first citation in any review of 1984. (Perhaps I should note that for all Orwell’s lobbying for Struve, there’s no evidence that Orwell did anything on behalf of the Mandelstam sketches.) Struve is a likely avenue by which Orwell found out about Kostomarov, an Orwell adherent, unlikely to flag an antecedent that could be damaging to Orwell, and by association his own reputation. Orwell was Struve’s best grip on normative literary history, as also held true for Lydia Jackson, who was as likely as Struve, or even more so, to have known about and told Orwell about Kostomarov’s “Animal Riot.” Lydia Jackson (pen name Elisaveta Fen) was a translator who rendered Chekhov into English for Penguin Books. A memoirist and journalist, she authored, among other books, A Girl Grew up in Russia, A Russian Childhood, Russian Family, A Test of Family Attitudes, and A Russian’s England: Reminiscences of Years 1926–1940. Jackson was born in Russia, surname Zhiburtovich, and by the time she met Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1935, she had been out of college for sixteen years and had already led two lives, the first as a working intellectual in Russia, and the second, beginning in 1925, in the same cast, but in England. Ten years later, in 1935, she returned to her education, The University College London, where she met and lived with Eileen, then twenty-nine. The two grew close, and lived together during their schooling. There’s no evidence that their relationship was romantic, other than the tone of the epistolary record, and gay through-line in Jackson’s memoir (as Elisaveta Fen), Remembering Russia. Jackson’s relationship with Eileen was steadfast through the war and until Eileen’s death in 1945; Jackson was also close to Orwell, corresponding with him, and in 1938 kissing him on a walk at the Aylesford Sanatorium. By her telling, she was too “softhearted to repel him,” the kiss was little more than “an awkward situation,” and she ultimately refused him. His letters to her,

16

“Review of ‘We’ by E. I. Zamyatin.” Tribune, January 4, 1946.

17

Chatto & Windus, 1932.

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pleading her to return from Marrakech and instructing her to burn the correspondence, suggest more than that, and we know that Orwell was at times unfaithful to his wife. Jackson, for her part, was continuously living out a diva’s drama. Or several diva’s dreams at once. In the Orwell circle of 1938, for instance, Jackson was seeing a younger man, a German, who believed he was in love with her, while she, who didn’t love him, was convinced that he was in love with Eileen. Orwell and Eileen were always a gateway to Jackson, who discussed the couple, as individuals and as a pair, in her voluminous memoirs. Her tale: though tolerant of Orwell—she on-and-off lived with the couple in their Wallington cottage after the London bombings of 1940—Orwell irritated her with his forced masculinity, and she was sorry Eileen had married him. Still, Jackson was one of the first people that Orwell informed of Eileen’s sudden death. Question: if there was more to Jackson and Orwell, why would she keep it a secret? Jackson’s papers, available at the Leeds University Library, may have more to offer on the subject, but if she did omit anything, she was likely concerned about her epitaph. She is, as self-described, beyond reproach. An affair with Orwell would besmirch her place in history. Which is the same reason why she, like Struve, wouldn’t have trumpeted for Kostomarov’s “Animal Riot.” When Animal Farm first came out, it was inconsequential enough that the source hardly mattered. And with Animal Farm’s success, Orwell, who was already important to Fen, and important to Struve, would have been a poorly chosen target. After Orwell’s death, the Orwell lobby was too powerful and frightening a propaganda machine to challenge. “Animal Riot” has been discussed as a source for Animal Farm since at least the 1980s, and very possibly from the time of Animal Farm’s first release, and yet the fullness of the synchronicity is little addressed, and dismissed by uninformed Orwellites as happenstance. Also dismissed: that Orwell wrote lists of enemies for the British Secret Service, and that some versions of the lists, as well as the associated histories and contexts, are still classified (which is to say Orwell really hurt the lives and careers of those people).18 While knowledge of “Animal Riot” may have passed directly from Fen to Orwell, it may have been telephoned from Fen or Fen’s circles to Eileen, who then discussed the potentials of the allegory with her husband. According to Michael Shelden,19 anointed Orwell biographer, as well as subsequent biographers, Eileen was integral to the writing of Animal Farm. The “wry humor” of Animal Farm, according to Sheldon, was attributable to Eileen. John 18 The lists were discovered, written about, and then, in the fashion of Orwell’s own analysis of self-censorship, ignored for the reason that this particular truth “just wouldn’t do” to talk about. Perhaps our propriety isn’t independent of that fact that Orwell—via the Congress for Cultural Freedom and what was to become the “Cold War”—is arguably the most subsidized literary writer in the history of Western literature. (The term “Cold War” is Orwell’s own coinage.) 19

Michael Shelden. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. Politico Publishing, 2006.

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Rodden and John Rossi, in The Cambridge Introduction to George Orwell, echo Sheldon: “Each night, he shared the latest progress of his tale with her while she would give him her reactions.” Rodden and Rossi go on: “According to a close friend, Lettice Cooper, who worked with her at the Ministry of Food, Eileen would fill her in the next day on the story’s progress. … In a letter to Dorothy Plowman20 after Animal Farm was published, Orwell wrote that he was sorry Eileen didn’t live to see his success. He wrote that she was fond of Animal Farm, which she ‘even helped in the planning of.’” More? Eileen’s nickname, since college, was “pig.” Her friends addressed her by that moniker, in person and correspondence, as did her husband. In time (I hope), Orwell’s overlap with Kostomarov will consider the full archives of Orwell, Struve, Jackson, and Eileen, as well as those of Maria Krieger and Boris Souvarine, who are additionally likely to have discussed Kostomarov with Orwell. There’s also Orwell in Spain with POUM, Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, and the Russian influences he gathered over the course of a political life and philosophy that orbited Russia. The task seems endless because it is. Orwell heard about Kostomarov many, many times, too many to count, and saying he hadn’t heard of him is analogous to saying a later twentieth century Western writer never heard of, hmm, Yukio Mishima, or Kahlil Gibran. Orwell was surrounded by Russians, people who knew Russians, and Russian culture. His collaboration with the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, and what would later become MI6, allowed for his poorly published novella, Animal Farm, to settle into the hands of seventy years of Western schoolchildren. The Information Research Department, which is the arm of the British Secret Service to which Orwell enlisted his voice, was staffed by and in league with some of the most eminent literary figures of its day, an international force, which included Orwell’s closest friends. Notables: Arthur Koestler, and Nobel Prize winner, Bertrand Russell. Celia Kirwan, whose sister was married to Arthur Koestler, was a literary ally of Orwell’s (she had been one of four women he’d proposed to in quick succession after the death of his first wife). Not only are we in a historical moment when the West was looking to Russia for political, literary, and cultural intelligence, we’re looking at a circle of people whose primary interest, and primary professional interest, was to understand Russian influence, and finally, outmaneuver it. Which is what Animal Farm did. And … the story itself. “Animal Riot.” To begin, conceptual equivalencies to Animal Farm: . . . . 20

An allegory about revolution in the form of a farmyard story that tells of anthropomorphic animals “Letters to Dorothy Plowman.” Orwell literary estate, 1941.

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. . . .

who overthrow the farmer and take control of the economy of the farm to no good end.

“Animal Riot” is a cautionary farmyard allegory that tells a tale of talking animals, their uprising against a despotic farmer, and the failure of it all. In plain terms, the resemblance of “Animal Riot” to Animal Farm is far more than a passing familiarity. In conceit, it is the same story. Big picture, it would be easier to tally the differences: . Kostomarov employs a narrator, Orwell doesn’t; . Kostomarov’s farmyard unrest is aroused by the oratory of an Old Bull, as opposed to the oratory of Old Major, Orwell’s old pig, and the revolution itself—the revolution and the revolutionary government—is headed by bulls, not pigs. The conceptual differences stop there. Onto major similarities: 1. In the evenings, an old bull speaks to the animals in their pens, decrying the injustice of their lot. The old bull’s speech begins21 : “Brother bulls, sister and wife cows! Honorable animals, worthy of a better lot than the one you bear at the will of some unknown fate, one which enslaves you to the tyrant human! For a long time—so long that our animal memory cannot even estimate—you have drank from the trough of calamity and can never seem to get to the bottom.”

And, in Animal Farm, we’ll quote the second paragraph of Old Major’s barn oration: “Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant that our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty.”

2. For the next three paragraphs, kostomarov’s bull discusses humankind: “Using the superiority of his mind over ours, the treacherous tyrant subjugates us, we of feeble minds, so much that we have lost the dignity of living beings and have become like unthinking tools to satisfy his whims. 21 Tanya Paperny, the translator, was consciously trying to stay agnostic as to the Animal Farm / “Animal Riot” question.

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The humans milk our mothers and wives, depriving our little baby calves, and what don’t they make from our cow’s milk! After all this milk is our property and not theirs! Instead of our cows, let them milk their own women. But no, apparently they don’t like their own milk so much—ours is tastier! And that’s not all. We bulls are a kindhearted people: we would have allowed ourselves to be milked as long as they didn’t do anything worse. But again, look what they do to our poor calves. They load the poor little things in a cart, tie their legs, and take them away! And where do they carry them? To have their throats cut, torn from their mother’s teat! The greedy tyrant has taken a liking to their meat, and how! He considers it one of his best dishes! And what does the tyrant do to our adult brethren? Over there, our brother the noble ox is carrying a heavy yoke on his neck to drag a plow and dig holes for the tyrant. Our tyrant throws seeds into the ground dug up by the ox’s labor, and from that grain grows grass, and from that grass our tyrant knows how to make this clod, just like earth only whiter, and our tyrant calls this bread and devours it because it is very tasty. And suppose our horned brother dares to walk out onto the field— plowed previously by his own labor—to enjoy tasty grasses. Our brother will be chased out with a whip or even a club. But in fact, the grass growing on that field is our property and not man’s. After all it was our brother who dragged the plow and tilled the earth. Without that this grass would not have grown on the field by itself. He who labors should get to reap the benefits of that labor. So it should follow: you yoked us to the plow and used our labor to dig up the field, so give us the grass sown on that field. And if man needs to take some grain, which he tossed into the land dug up by our labor, for himself, then he should at least give us half and take the other half for himself. But he greedily takes it all, and what is left for us is nothing but a beating. Our animal brothers are such a kindhearted people that they would tolerate even this. But the cruelty of our tyrant toward us grown bulls does not end there!”

Orwell’s Old Major, in his next two paragraphs, the same: “But is this simply part of the order of nature? Is it because this land of ours is so poor that it cannot afford a decent life to those who dwell upon it? No, comrades, a thousand times no! The soil of England is fertile, its climate is good, it is capable of affording food in abundance to an enormously greater number of animals than now inhabit it. This single farm of ours would support a dozen horses, twenty cows, hundreds of sheep—and all of them living in a comfort and a dignity that are now almost beyond our imagining. Why then do we continue in this miserable condition? Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labor is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word—Man. Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.

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Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself. Our labor tills the soil, our dung fertilizes it, and yet there is not one of us that owns more than his bare skin. You cows that I see before me, how many thousands of gallons of milk have you given during this last year? And what has happened to that milk which should have been breeding up sturdy calves? Every drop of it has gone down the throats of our enemies. And you hens, how many eggs have you laid in this last year, and how many of those eggs ever hatched into chickens? The rest have all gone to market to bring in money for Jones and his men. And you, Clover, where are those four foals you bore, who should have been the support and pleasure of your old age? Each was sold at a year old—you will never see one of them again. In return for your four confinements and all your labor in the fields, what have you ever had except your bare rations and a stall?”

3. The Bull’s next paragraph, the slaughterhouse: “Has it ever happened to you, brother, that you are grazing in the field and see them driving a herd of our brother cattle, or even sheep, along the posted road? The herd is so plump, happy and playful! You might think the tyrant has taken pity and repented for his misdeeds against our breed. He fattened us up and set us free. Not a chance! The stupid bull is playing and thinks he has just been set free to the wide-open steppe. But he will soon find out what kind of freedom awaits him! Yes, the tyrant fed him alright: all summer our brother beast walked the fields in complete happiness, and they didn’t torment him with work, but why? Why did the tyrant become so merciful toward his animals? Here is why: ask where they are taking this bull now, and you will learn that the enemy master sold his bull to another evil member of the human race who will then take the bull to a huge human pen, which they call a city. As soon as they get there, they will drag the poor animal to a slaughterhouse, and there the old bull will suffer the same fate as the young calves, only more torturous. Do you know, brother, about this slaughterhouse where they are taken? You will feel a chill creep through your veins as soon as you realize what they do at that slaughterhouse, so it is for good reason that our brother beast lows pitifully when nearing the city where it is located. They tie the poor bull to a post, and then the evildoer approaches with a hatchet and hits him square on the head between the horns. The bull howls from fear and pain, stands on his hind legs and the evildoer gives it to him one more time—then a knife to the throat. One after the first, then a third, then a dozen and another dozen, until he’s gotten a hundred bulls. Bovine blood spills in torrents. Then they take the skin off the dead ones, cut the meat into chunks and sell it in their markets. The other bulls that were brought to the city to be killed walk past those stands and

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see the meat of their comrades hanging there, and their bovine hearts sense that soon the same fate will befall them! From our skin, the tyrant makes shoes to protect his cursed feet, and from that very skin he makes different types of bags to pack his things. These he tosses into a cart, and to this very cart he’ll tie up our brother. And from that same skin he cuts out narrow strips to make whips, and he strikes us with those same whips made of our skin. Sometimes they even beat one another with these whips made from our skin! Heartless tyrants! Not only do they behave this way toward us: they manage no better between themselves! They enslave one another, they torment and torture one another … what a mean breed these humans! There is no one meaner on earth. Meaner than all the animals! And somehow this fierce, bloodthirsty creature ensnared us innocent animals into hard, unbearable bondage. Now, considering all this, is our fate not sour?”

Old Major’s next paragraph, also, the slaughterhouse: “And even the miserable lives we lead are not allowed to reach their natural span. For myself I do not grumble, for I am one of the lucky ones. I am twelve years old and have had over four hundred children. Such is the natural life of a pig. But no animal escapes the cruel knife in the end. You young porkers who are sitting in front of me, every one of you will scream your lives out at the block within a year. To that horror we all must come—cows, pigs, hens, sheep, everyone. Even the horses and the dogs have no better fate. You, Boxer, the very day that those great muscles of yours lose their power, Jones will sell you to the knacker, who will cut your throat and boil you down for the foxhounds. As for the dogs, when they grow old and toothless, Jones ties a brick round their necks and drowns them in the nearest pond.”

4. Next two paragraphs, the bull comes to his subject, revolution: “But are we actually stuck here? Are we actually so weak that we can never free ourselves from this slavery? Do we not have horns? Were there not times when in a fit of righteous indignation our horned brothers ripped open the stomachs of our oppressors? When our horned brother kicks a human, does he not immediately break the human’s leg or arm? What are we, weak? After all, our enemy harnesses our horned brother precisely when he needs to carry a heavy load, one a human can’t lift himself. Hence our tyrant knows well that we have much strength, more strength than he. Our oppressor only dares when he does not expect any resistance from us; when he sees that we will not submit to him, he calls over other brother men who run to join in the treachery. Some days the cattle herd does not want to obey the herder—he is herding to the right but the bulls want to go left—so the herder will call on other herdsmen to surround us, one from one side, another from the other side, and the

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third will get up in front to scare one of our brothers. This way they can lead the whole herd where they want to. For their feeble-mindedness, ours do not realize that even though they are surrounded on all sides by herders, those cattlemen are still smaller than our brothers. They should not obey but point their horns at the herder, who would then go away because they would not be able to manage our herd. But ours do not realize what to do and are obedient—they walk where they are led and just sigh, for there is much to sigh about. Our brothers would love to eat some tasty field grasses and play around a bit the way they like to—butt each other with their horns for fun, scratch up on the tree. But they do not let us over there and instead lead us to a pasture where other than some short knotweeds, there is nothing to nibble on, or they chase us into a lonely pen to chew on straw. All this because we are obedient and afraid to show our animal dignity.”

Old Major, next two paragraphs, the same: “Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings? Only get rid of Man, and the produce of our labor would be our own. Almost overnight we could become rich and free. What then must we do? Why, work night and day, body and soul, for the overthrow of the human race! That is my message to you, comrades: rebellion! I do not know when that Rebellion will come, it might be in a week or in a hundred years, but I know, as surely as I see this straw beneath my feet, that sooner or later justice will be done. Fix your eyes on that, comrades, throughout the short remainder of your lives! And above all, pass on this message of mine to those who come after you, so that future generations shall carry on the struggle until it is victorious. And remember, comrades, your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies. Man serves the interests of no creature except himself. And among us animals let there be perfect unity, perfect comradeship in the struggle. All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.”

5. Onto the bull’s rousing conclusion: “Let us stop obeying the tyrant: let us announce our intentions not just with our bellowing but with simultaneous jumping and headbutting; let us show that we want to be free animals by any means necessary and not his cowardly slaves. Oh, brother bulls and sister cows! We have long been young and naive! But a different period has come—new times are upon us! We have now matured enough, wizened up, evolved! It’s time to throw off the miserable chains of slavery and avenge our ancestors, those tortured by work, emaciated by hunger and bad feed, stuck under whip cracks and heavy

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carts, killed in slaughterhouses and ripped into chunks by our torturers. Let us rise up together, united under one horn! And we cattle are not alone as we rise up against humans: for one, the horses are striking with us, and the goats, sheep and pigs—all domestic creatures whom the human has enslaved will rise up for freedom from our shared tyrant. We will cease all our internal fighting, all petty disagreements between individuals, and at every moment we will remember that we share a common enemy and oppressor. We will achieve equality, liberty and independence; restore the overthrown and trampled dignity of all living animals; and bring back those happy times when animals were still free and not trapped under the cruel reign of humans. Let us go back to those blissful old times: all the fields, meadows, pastures, groves and wheat fields will be ours, and we will have the right to graze, buck and playfully butt our heads where ever we want. We will start living in total freedom and absolute happiness. Long live bestiality! Down with mankind!”

And, Orwell digresses, examining the rat population to establish the equivalence of class = species, which Kostomarov did at the outset (an interlude with the rats is also a much-needed break from the bull’s, and Old Major’s, too-long speech). Then, like the bull, Old Major lands a galvanizing note: “I have little more to say. I merely repeat, remember always your duty of enmity towards Man and all his ways. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. And remember also that in fighting against Man, we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices. No animal must ever live in a house, or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade. All the habits of Man are evil. And, above all, no animal must ever tyrannize over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal. And now, comrades, I will tell you about my dream of last night. I cannot describe that dream to you. It was a dream of the earth as it will be when Man has vanished. But it reminded me of something that I had long forgotten. Many years ago, when I was a little pig, my mother and the other sows used to sing an old song of which they knew only the tune and the first three words. I had known that tune in my infancy, but it had long since passed out of my mind. Last night, however, it came back to me in my dream. And what is more, the words of the song also came backwards, I am certain, which were sung by the animals of long ago and have been lost to memory for generations. I will sing you that song now, comrades. I am old and my voice is hoarse, but when I have taught you the tune, you can sing it better for yourselves. It is called ‘Beasts of England.’”

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6. Next, the bull’s seed of foment: The bull’s outrageous speech achieved the desired effect. Afterwards, for the whole summer, cattle spread revolutionary ideas throughout the pens, pastures and paddocks, and they started underground meetings where all they talked about was how and with what act they should launch their revolt against man. Many were of the belief that acting alone was easiest, ramming one’s horns at one or the other of the cattlemen until all were eradicated; others who were a bit more courageous proposed it was better to right away get rid of the one giving orders to all the cattlemen: first slaughter the master himself. But those oxen who used to go on Chumak trading trips and had expanded their worldview offered the following idea: “What good will it do if we kill the lead tyrant? He will not be in power anymore, but then another will just take his place. If we are taking on the grand project of liberating the animal kingdom, then it needs to be done firmly to carry out a fundamental transformation of animal society, and we need to use our animal minds to develop foundations on which to forever establish our well-being. And can we as cattle organize this for everyone else? No! No! This is not exclusively our project, but one for all the different animal species enslaved to man! Horses and goats, sheep and pigs, and perhaps even caged birds all need to rise up against our common enemy, and when we throw off our wretched bondage, we will have a general gathering of all beasts to establish a new liberated union.” This bullish insubordination spilled over to the horses, whose herd grazed on the same field as the cattle. The spirit of mutiny then fully penetrated their neighing society.

And, after the full rendition of “The Beasts of England” and a chapter break, Old Major’s seed of foment: Three nights later old Major died peacefully in his sleep. His body was buried at the foot of the orchard. This was early in March. During the next three months there was much secret activity. Major’s speech had given to the more intelligent animals on the farm a completely new outlook on life. They did not know when the Rebellion predicted by Major would take place, they had no reason for thinking that it would be within their own lifetime, but they saw clearly that it was their duty to prepare for it. The work of teaching and organizing the others fell naturally upon the pigs, who were generally recognized as being the cleverest of the animals. Pre-eminent among the pigs were two young boars named Snowball and Napoleon, whom Mr. Jones was breeding up for sale. Napoleon was a large, rather fierce looking Berkshire boar, the only Berkshire on the farm, not much of a talker, but with a reputation for getting his own way. Snowball was a more vivacious pig than Napoleon, quicker in speech and more inventive, but was not considered to have the same depth of character. All the other male pigs on the farm were porkers. The best known among them was a small fat pig named Squealer, with very round cheeks, twinkling eyes, nimble

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movements, and a shrill voice. He was a brilliant talker, and when he was arguing some difficult point he had a way of skipping from side to side and whisking his tail which was somehow very persuasive. The others said of Squealer that he could turn black into white. These three had elaborated old Major’s teachings into a complete system of thought, to which they gave the name of Animalism. Several nights a week, after Mr. Jones was asleep, they held secret meetings in the barn and expounded the principles of Animalism to the others. At the beginning they met with much stupidity and apathy. Some of the animals talked of the duty of loyalty to Mr. Jones, whom they referred to as “Master,” or made elementary remarks such as “Mr. Jones feeds us. If he were gone, we should starve to death.” Others asked such questions as “Why should we care what happens after we are dead?” or “If this Rebellion is to happen anyway, what difference does it make whether we work for it or not?” and the pigs had great difficulty in making them see that this was contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The stupidest questions of all were asked by Mollie, the white mare. The very first question she asked Snowball was: “Will there still be sugar after the Rebellion?”

7. The next paragraphs of “Animal Riot” discuss the horses, which have to be managed independently of the other animals. “Some of our brothers, satiated with oats and hay, are not tormented with work; if they get saddled or harnessed, then only for a short time, and then they are spared and sent to rest. They stand in their stables and eat plenty of oats, and as soon as they get let out to graze, they play, jump and enjoy themselves. Some do not get left in the stalls all—instead they walk in total freedom through expansive fields with their mares, while others, always half starving, exhausted from the incessant chase and from heavy loads, get no reward for their hard work other than blows from a whip! Brothers! Have you no hooves and teeth? Can you not bellow and bite? Or did you become weak? But look how often our tyrant pays miserably for his arrogance when he attacks a proud horse who, in a burst of memory about his equine nobility, breaks out so that even four villains cannot contain him; and if the arrogant and defiant despot dares mount him, this horse will throw him off and sometimes even stomp on him a bit, enough that the bastard lays injured for several days! The despot considers us so dumb and slavishly obedient that he is not afraid to give our brothers weapons we could use against him. Did he not hammer nails into our hooves! Horseshoed horses! Turn the weapons he gave you back on him: smite him with your horseshoes! And you, unshoed ones, show him that even without horseshoes your hooves are so strong and heavy that with them you can demonstrate your superiority over man! With or without horseshoes, let us unite our hooves and rise up in brotherhood against our fierce enemy.

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Besides hooves, let us consider our teeth. With those you can inflict no less harm upon our subjugator! Let us fight for our freedom! Future equine generations will honor you for many centuries. And not just the equine race but other animals will honor you: we will all join at once! All of the grains left on the stalks and all the grasses will be ours. No one will dare chase us out of there like they used to. Never again will they harness us, saddle us or urge us on with whips. Freedom! Freedom! To battle, brothers! Collective freedom for all animals, for the honor of the equine race.”

Having left Mollie for a moment to discuss Moses the Raven, Orwell, too, considers the horses separately. Like “Animal Riot,” Animal Farm concludes its equine section with vociferous compliance. (In the developing character of Orwell’s proletarian hero Boxer, dumb but full of strength and courage, the echo of Kostomarov will remain.) Their most faithful disciples were the two carthorses, Boxer and Clover. These two had great difficulty in thinking anything out for themselves, but having once accepted the pigs as their teachers, they absorbed everything that they were told, and passed it on to the other animals by simple arguments. They were unfailing in their attendance at the secret meetings in the barn, and led the singing of ‘Beasts of England,’ with which the meetings always ended.

8. In the pages that follow, after further incitement by the leaders, the animals of “Animal Riot” storm “the manor.” In Animal Farm, along with the incitements, the riot is sparked by Mr. Jones’ unjust treatment; the storming of the Manor Farm is otherwise the same. 9. Post animal takeover, Kostomarov turns his attention to the greed of the pigs. Says one pig: “We’ll invade the master’s garden; there he has a vegetable patch. We’ll dig up all the rows. Then we’ll break into his flower bed, which he planted right near the balcony for his own pleasure. There we’ll turn everything upside down, like pigs! Don’t let those humans forget what pigs did to his garden and to his flower bed!”

Orwell, as well, transitions to pigs: “Never mind the milk, comrades!” cried Napoleon, placing himself in front of the buckets. “That will be attended to. The harvest is more important. Comrade Snowball will lead the way. I shall follow in a few minutes. Forward, comrades! The hay is waiting.”

To paraphrase the remainder of the text comparison: in the ensuing pages of “Animal Riot,” the subject of the dogs will arise, as will the bleating sheep,

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as will a possible inspiration for Moses the raven, and as will a wooden tower very much in keeping with the Orwell’s windmill. In the pivotal moment, the four-legged animals walk on two legs. All the while, propaganda commands the proles. And, ultimately, the revolution in both “Animal Riot” and Animal Farm, will founder. In the case of “Animal Riot,” the humans return; Animal Farm, the pigs will become the humans. And let me point out that the similarities—almost uncountable if you close-read the texts—come in order. One thing after another, the same, and in the same order. And the parts that aren’t so much the same? Referencing some dozen plus sources for 1984, Orwell biographer Bernard Crick notes22 that Orwell “greatly improved and transcended” his borrowings. Kostomarov’s characterization was thin, his dialog ponderous, and his story rushed. Orwell, not so. The gulf between “Animal Riot” and Animal Farm doesn’t look like chance; it looks like consciousness; and it looks like revision. Like what you’d expect from a creative work by a scholar, and what you’d expect when a veteran novelist takes a fledgling effort and expands it from 9000 to 30,000 words. Like Kostomarov’s last name, there are numerous translations of the title “Animal Riot,” which is represented in English as “Beast Revolt” and “Animal Revolt,” etcetera, which is perhaps why its history is so piecemeal in English today. Regardless, to look at the two stories is to recognize a startling sameness, which is why “Animal Riot” refuses to fall out of history. (In June of 1988, The Moscow News ran a brief point-by-point comparison of the two stories, as did The Economist , a month later.) The question remains: why would Orwell keep the story a secret? He didn’t keep secret that Zamyatin’s We had been a reference. Well, three answers; (1) Orwell didn’t talk about “Animal Riot,” which isn’t to say he denied a connection; (2) As David Saunders lays out in his essay “Mykola Kostomarov (1817–1885) and the Creation of a Ukrainian Identity,” Kostomarov was in political disfavor from the 20s to the 50s; (3) The works are too alike. I don’t know what copyrights were in effect (Russian laws varied by state), but if “Animal Riot” was originally published in 1917 (current thinking in English), it may have been copyright protected in 1945. Or, it could be this pattern of borrowing from Russian thinkers was more common and endemic than Orwell felt comfortable revealing. More digging? Alas, yes. If we want to prove that much more that the proximity of these stories is not serendipity, the archives await. (Orwell’s lists, as well.) Yet, here we are, perhaps making a point truer to Orwell, and truer to his virtues. For all of our reservations about Orwell, his collaboration with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, his pettiness and bigotry, I can’t believe that he wanted Animal Farm to be a justification for unthinking conformity, which was something he feared, and railed against. Maybe, then, Animal Farm, in a new context, will live more vitally than before, and Orwell can finally prevail. Another fallen hero? Perhaps. But wouldn’t Old Benjamin have wanted us to know the truth?

22

George Orwell: A Life. Little Brown, 1981.

2003: Saint George and the Damn Truth November 10, 2003

To look at the history of the Saints, the question asks itself: how many people must die in your name before you’re canonized? On this centennial year of his birth, George Orwell—who coined the term Cold War, and remains our faithful Cold War pedagogue after nearly sixty years—has apparently tallied the sufficient number. Virtue, in the hands of religionists, often turns to vice.1 And in a time when political discussions have taken on fanatical polarity, Orwell, who despite his flaws, sought to be reasonable, is consistently camped in the temples of intransigence. He is the champion of Trotskyite perpetual warriors, militant right-to-lifers, and fiercely defensive gun toters. Few would assert that Orwell the man is personally guilty of all the obtuseness that he is invoked to vindicate. Equally untenable is the position that Orwell was not responsible for his life and work. He did and wrote things that can’t be explained away. From The New Yorker’s Louis Menand, you won’t find out what those things are. Despite his lengthy January commentary,2 Menand will not tell

A version of this essay was originally published by MobyLives /Melville House Publishing. 1 Post-9/11, the fear of and war against the Islamic Terrorist dominated politics, culture, and policy, and had already carried over into the war in Iraq. 2 One of the many Orwell apologias: “So Misunderstood.” The New Yorker, January 27, 2003.

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you—will not even mention—that Orwell penned a list of thirty-five names for the IRD, or Information Research Department (which was overseen by the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6), and that the degree to which those artists and writers were damaged by Orwell is still undisclosed. Christopher Hitchens, the Grand Poobah of the cult of Orwell, demonstrates a similar inability to exercise what Orwell called “the power of facing.” His general formula on questions concerning Beastly George is to concede any minor point—such as whether or not Orwell hit so-and-so with a walking stick or Orwell’s small-mindedness on the metric system—but to outright dismiss any major point. Rival intellectuals are fools and liars. When cornered, Hitchens will reiterate age-old truisms that Orwell was always trying to be right (even when he was wrong) and is, therefore, worthy of praise in any circumstance.3 One would think that after Hitchens’ attack on Mother Teresa,4 he would be immune to this Saint/Greatness argument, yet, the canonization of a “great man” is indeed the thesis of his aptly titled Orwell’s Victory 5 (a reference to Orwell’s Cold War investment). Hitchens, like Menand, will spare no effort to excuse and justify his savior. The Orwell beatifiers will grant the quibbles: Orwell had some unresolved sexual issues, didn’t do well with women, thought poor people smelled, didn’t live down and out, dramatized his journalism, and never entirely escaped his colonialist upbringing. Certainly, one won’t find the idea that Orwell was a political opportunist. Yes, they will aver, Orwell was constantly reassessing himself. Yes, in his essay “Why I Write,”6 the number one reason was “Sheer Egoism.” Yes, there were the flip-flops, such as Orwell’s reluctant turn-around on Hitler (against, laudably).7 But no, Orwell never waffled or switched teams 3 George Orwell. Edited by Peter Hobley Davison. I Have Tried to Tell the Truth: 1943– 1944. Secker & Warburg, 1998; Orwell lumpenly contends that even murder is excused by self-righteousness: “You may not understand this, but I don’t think it matters killing people so long as you don’t hate them. I also think that there are times when you can only show your feeling of brotherhood for someone else by killing him, or trying to. … It is a job that has to be done.” 4

The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. Verso Books, 1995.

5

Orwell’s Victory or Why Orwell Matters . Basic Books, 2002.

6

Gangrel , Summer 1946.

7

From George Orwell’s 1940 Review of Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler (the review was published in The New English Weekly, March 21, 1940): I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett’s edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself.

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or considered personal consequence; he was just a bumbling Englishman who, in the end, was always right. Orwell’s defenders regularly look to contextualize Orwell’s shortcomings in a historic moment. Whatever his infraction, he was a victim of circumstance— times were different then, and, for example, Hitler was looking really good for a minute there. Orwell never meant that his books should be employed to stultify schoolchildren. And yet that’s what Animal Farm is—an educational missile aimed at any healthy impulse toward reform. The argument that Animal Farm is a generalized indictment of totalitarianism is simply unsupportable by the text or any existing presentation of the text. Rather, the intelligence of the pigs opposed to the stupidity of the other animals, and the ultimate hopelessness of revolution, renders Animal Farm a de facto endorsement of the status quo. Orwell, with his master understanding of propaganda, did not accidentally exclude Germany, Italy, and Japan from his allegory. He knew that he was writing against the East, for the West. But the assertion that the Cold War was won by the arms race, as fueled by the enemy-out-there equation of Animal Farm, is as undemonstrable as it is unconvincing. Because the manufacture of weapons is far less expensive in a Communist state, it’s more probable that the US participation in the arms race delayed the inevitable collapse of a Soviet Union facing the superior economic model of the West. Orwell’s perpetual-war model was not just ill-advised, but far reaching, goading American policy-makers into forays all over the world. Trouble spots that pop into mind—Afghanistan, Iraq, and Korea. The current environment within America, in which any criticism of US policy is considered un-American, is precisely the McCarthy-esque inflammation we expect from such Cold War rhetoric—and it is no coincidence that George Orwell has been successfully drafted by Christopher Hitchens as a supporter of the George Bush “war on terrorism,” even if this kind of unexamined forward march is exactly what rankled Orwell most. Judging from Orwell’s stance on World War II and Winston Churchill, it’s likely that at this juncture, Orwell would have opposed military intervention in Iraq, and that even if he did support George Bush, it would be only with the utmost antagonism. But that’s part of canonizing someone. To quote The Book Of Matthew’s Jesus (23:25): “Woe, unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye make clean the outside of the cup and of the platter, but within they are full of The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can’t win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

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extortion and excess.” Despite all the lip service paid to the nuanced argument, that’s exactly what we can’t have, especially not about great men. They are cast in bronze and unassailable. Not to say that Orwell, even if he did make his own bed, would have liked lying in it. Orwell’s appeal is that it’s impossible to believe he’d stand by a political formulation fifty-five years old. (It’s interesting to consider that if Orwell had survived another twenty or thirty years, in the light of his happyfrog-type essays, he might have sought redemption in environmental issues.) In Orwell’s “Inside the Whale,”8 Orwell deduces that “a writer tells you a great deal about himself while talking about somebody else.” In 1955, Raymond Williams, in considering Orwell’s covert collaborations, alluded to the argument, “Orwell’s reports are indeed documents, but largely of himself.” With that in mind, Orwell’s opinions on canonization (“Reflections on Gandhi,” 1949) are particularly revealing. Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent. … In Gandhi’s case the questions one feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity—by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power— and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud?

Orwell doesn’t doubt that Gandhi was conscious of the Sainthood for which he lobbied—to Orwell, Gandhi’s complicity and incentives are the primary questions. That is to say—who was Gandhi on the inside? Herein was Orwell’s “commitment to the truth.” So, with that same insistence, we look to Orwell’s unspoken truth: Eric Blair, or “George Orwell,” was a complicated man with complicated motivations who did at least as many things wrong as he did right. And the best thing about him was that he probably would have agreed with that assessment; for all his mistakes, he would have had nothing but uneasiness for his own supporters, and the fundamentalism of their smelly little orthodoxies.

8

1932.

2003: The Anti-Matter of George Orwell April/May 2003

George Orwell matters because he coined the term “Cold War” and because he’s been the champion of Cold War propaganda since 1947. Despite the title of his latest, Christopher Hitchens won’t tell you that. He makes no effort to address the question of Why Orwell Matters (Basic Books, 2002). More in keeping with his trajectory is the UK title of the apologia, Orwell’s Victory—an imperialist boast too brazen for the United States. Orwell’s Victory probably wouldn’t have played too well with Orwell himself. To quote Benedict Nicolson, 1953, Orwell “was always rounding on his own side on the eve of victory, calmly pointing out that the glorious advance was only another sort of retreat: a retreat, as he would put it, from the truth.” But Hitchens has other interests; Orwell’s immature relationship to sexuality is a featured examination; Orwell’s Catholic notion of human babies (that there weren’t enough), his disdain for not just abortion but birth control, and the thinness of his estimation of women, makes Orwell, to Hitchens, all the more human.1 Hitchens also makes bemused excursions into Orwell’s curious cluelessness as to America and American culture.2

A version of this piece was originally published in The Brooklyn Rail . 1

As revealing of the author as the subject.

2

Hitchens is clueless as well: to Hitchens, American literature began with Mark Twain. The assertion, borrowed from Ernest Hemingway, was never “uncontroversial,” as Hitchens casually remarks, but intentionally perverse. Without wading into the discourse,

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Of course, if any of this is why Orwell matters, he doesn’t. One has the suspicion that, aside from the occasional gaffe, Hitchens’ personal/political history of Orwell is more or less correct—and yet, to read about Orwell and the metric system, or about the hotly contested question of who hit whom with a walking stick seventy years ago, is to wonder why one isn’t doing the dishes. Most of the time, it feels like the predominant strategy of the Orwell defense is to bore us into submission. Even Hitchens’ thesis—that Orwell “got right” the three most important issues of the twentieth century, Stalinism, imperialism, and fascism—feels weirdly outmoded. Maybe, to look singularly at the first half of the twentieth century, one could argue that those issues fill out the top three spots. But to look at the second half of the twentieth century, the win, place, and show would be something more along the lines of race, religion, and representation. And, looking back on the century as a whole, the most important issues would have to be food, fuel, and maybe, retrospectively, water. For someone who speaks so beautifully, Hitchens mounts an argument for Orwell that is shimmeringly lackluster. Hitchens rattles off that Orwell “had dirt under his fingernails, and an understanding of the rhythms of nature”; we groan. Hitchens’ prose exhibits a peaty fluidity, but argument to argument, the entirety devolves. Because the majority of us, unlike Hitchens and Orwell, have not been and will never be Communists, the political infighting of the Communist Party is not only toilsome and outdated, but evasive of Orwell’s perpetual-war contribution to present-day dilemmas. Hitchens fails to engage the central issue—the millions of classroom copies of Animal Farm and 1984 and the impact that has, does, and will have on any child who wishes to exhibit a healthy contrarian point of view. To exhibit a revolutionary impulse in American public schools is to be met with brays of, “Four legs good, two legs bad.” Hitchens, for all his talk of nuanced debate, is not concerned with such niceties. In his latest incarnation (Tory Anarchist?3 ) Hitchens plays to a majority of literate America would cite Washington Irving’s 1809 burlesque, The History of New York, as the start of American letters. 3 Orwell fancied himself a “Tory Anarchist.” Hitchens, at around the time of this review, was making a sharp turn to the political right, much in the way of Orwell’s rightward turn during and after World War II. In Hitchens’ case, the justification was 9/11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 1942, George Woodcock, a Canadian writer, thinker, and anarchist, descried Orwell’s betrayal in the left-leaning American journal Partisan Review (publication dated to May 19): “Comrade Orwell, the former police official of British imperialism (from which the Fascists learnt all they know) in those regions of the Far East where the sun at last sets for ever on the bedraggled Union Jack! Comrade Orwell, former fellow-traveler of the pacifists and regular contributor to the pacifist Adelphi—which he now attacks! Comrade Orwell, former extreme Left-Winger, I. L. P. partisan and defender of Anarchists (see Homage to Catalonia)! And now Comrade Orwell who returns to his old imperialist allegiances and works at the BBC conducting British propaganda to fox the Indian masses!” Despite the public attack, Orwell and Woodcock would later become friendly, or at least collegial; there was a presumed showmanship to the politics of Orwell and his foils.

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perpetual-war paranoia, tips patriotism to nationalism, and is ever on the hunt for the lowest common denominator. Dissent is unpatriotic. Even for those asking not if but how we should enter the fray, the answer is a raspy, “This is what we’re up against. Bin Ladenists.”4 Hitchens’ case for Orwell is—trust the good father. First, there was Alexander the Great, then there was George Orwell. They mean for the best and will lead us to better days. No matter that America won Orwell’s “Cold War” due to a better economic model, and not the Animal Farm model of perpetual war and the resulting arms race; no matter that within a Communist infrastructure, it’s cheaper to manufacture arms; no matter that we won the Cold War despite the arms race. For all his protestations, Hitchens is the Grand Poohbah of the cult of Orwell, and, in that capacity, it is his purview to protect Orwell from such rationality. Hitchens’ preference would be that Orwell be relegated to the past: “The disputes and debates and combats in which George Orwell took part are receding into history.” This, while erasing some history, such as the unmentionable fact that Animal Farm was based on Russian/Ukrainian Historian Nikolai Kostomarov’s story, “The Animal Riot,” and by almost any current legal standards would have faced charges of copyright infringement. In this day and age, to read “Shooting an Elephant” or The Road to Wigan Pier is to be offended, and yet Hitchens insists, “it has lately proved possible to reprint every single letter, book review, and essay composed by Orwell without exposing him to any embarrassment.” Hitchens objects that Orwell’s detractors are guilty of taking Orwell’s works, acts, and statements out of historical context. Isn’t surviving historical context the challenge of literature? None of the 11-year-olds reading Animal Farm are reading it in historical context. Today, Orwell is utilized to maintain an eternal enemy on the horizon. And the questioning of Orwell is not newfangled. Prior to the publication of Animal Farm, T.S. Eliot assessed that Orwell’s pigs, in comparison with the other farm animals, were too intelligent, and thus that age-old we’re-better-than-you justification of the ruling class, and that Orwell’s allegory presented an argument so negative so as to discourage political engagement—all of which was exactly correct, and in context. Demonstrating a consistent lack of aptitude for “the power of facing,” Hitchens dismisses the work of anyone he disagrees with. Salmon Rushdie, 4 To recall Orwell’s “The Freedom of the Press,” 1945/72: “The issue involved here is quite a simple one: is every opinion, however unpopular—however foolish, even—entitled to a hearing? Put it in that form and nearly any English intellectual will feel that he ought to say ‘Yes.’ But give it a concrete shape, and ask, ‘How about an attack on Stalin? Is that entitled to a hearing?’ and the answer more often than not will be ‘No.’ In that case the current orthodoxy happens to be challenged, and so the principle of free speech lapses. If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought. These people don’t see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.”

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Edward Said, Martin Amis, etc.—all wrong, foolish, or deceitful. Hitchens’ rule is, if it’s minor, concede it, and if it’s major say it’s minor. In his hiccup of a chapter discussing the most disputed issue of the Orwell legacy, Hitchens pooh-poohs the list of 135 names that Orwell wrote up in the capacity of an informer for the “Information Research Department” (of the British Secret Service). To Hitchens, Orwell didn’t mean any harm and probably didn’t do any harm, and the thirty-five names not yet released by the British government don’t indicate an obscuring of something untoward, such as a “blacklist,” but rather, the “inanity of British officialdom.” Of the list that has been released, Orwell’s bluntly racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic asides are similarly submitted to Hitchens’ power of sidestepping. (Throughout Orwell’s Victory, the arguments feel so extraneous that one cannot help but suppose all the quotes might be reasserted, as is, to support a wholly oppositional argument.) To Hitchens, Orwell cannot be held culpable for the list. He is, at worst, a victim of circumstance. Says Hitchens: “Sometimes his [Orwell’s] upbringing or his innate pessimism triumphed over his conscious efforts.” And while Orwell “analyzed the temptation among intellectuals to adapt themselves to power,” no such thought ever occurred to Orwell. Although Orwell numbered “sheer egoism” as #1 on another of his lists, “Why I Write,” Orwell is unfailingly without mercenary intent. While Orwell wrote that “There is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics,’” by Hitchens’ estimation, there was never any politicking in Orwell’s decision-making. (Thank heaven he flipflopped on Hitler, anyway.) And while Orwell “could feel the onset of the permanent war economy, and he already knew the use to which permanent war propaganda could be put,” he was unconscious of the use to which his list would be put. Though a master of propaganda, he just didn’t know they’d be using Animal Farm for that. When cornered, Hitchens always returns to the Great Man. Orwell was always trying, and that makes you great, and ultimately worthy of forgiveness, etc. Orwell himself disdained this Great Writer formulation, and one needn’t go far to guess that, confronted by such Sainthood, Orwell would be inclined to point back at Hitchens. Writers, Orwell observed, “tell you a great deal about [themselves], while talking about someone else.” We might find Orwell’s objection to his own canonization in his 1949 critique of Gandhi: One may feel, as I do, a sort of aesthetic distaste for Gandhi, one may reject the claims of sainthood made on his behalf (he never made any such claims about himself, by the way), one may also reject sainthood as an ideal and therefore feel that Gandhi’s basic aims were anti-human and reactionary: but regarded as a simple politician, and compared with the other leading political figures of our time, how clean a smell he has managed to leave behind!

Faint praise indeed. But still, if this is what Hitchens is hoping his critics will think of him (much as he writes, “Orwell kept his corner of the Cold War

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fairly clean”), Hitchens will leave no such air of odorlessness. Regardless of whether or not Orwell did make, or would have made, or would have recanted a turn to the right,5 Orwell, to Hitchens, is little more than self-justification. As much as Hitchens models himself on Orwell, one can’t dispel the notion that Orwell probably wouldn’t have liked Hitchens, either. Employing Orwell to bludgeon dissent, Hitchens has firmly positioned himself among the legions of “smelly little orthodoxies” that Orwell considered “a pox on the twentieth century”.

5 George Orwell. “As I Please.” Tribune, September 1, 1944: “Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet regime, or any other regime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.”

2003: A Modest Disposal: Jail All Living Artists. Elvis Stays February, 2003D

The recent Supreme Court ruling on copyright extension gives culture less incentive than ever to support artistic endeavors. The Supreme Court’s January 15 decision to uphold the 1998 Sonny Bono Act extends copyright to life of the creator plus seventy years, and ninety-five years for corporate copyrights. Designed to withhold Mickey Mouse from the public domain, the extension has been sold as a way to reward artists for their creations. But since copyrights on revenue-generating works are rarely held by artists or their families, this can’t be viewed as the Act’s primary intention, which is to increase the value of copyrights already maintained by corporations. Lawrence Lessig, known as a champion of copyright reform, unsuccessfully argued against the Act before the court, losing by a margin of seven justices to two. But even Lessig has no apparent interest in protecting living artists; the principal interest of his client, Eric Eldred, was unfettered access to the literary tomb of Robert Frost. Lessig’s suggestions for self-regulating copyright reform is that living artists get even poorer. One proposal would have artists voluntarily limit their copyrights to fifteen years—in other words, diminish the potential earning of their work in an environment where corporations expect infinite holding. Another proposal by Lessig would have the work of unrecognized artists go immediately into the public domain, another boon to corporations.

A version of this editorial was originally published in The New York Press . The original pull quote read: “What about fashion? Well, designers could be judged case by case. Martin Margiela? Jail. Kathy Ireland? No, no need to jail her. Jean Paul Gaultier? Parole.” © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Reed, The Never End, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_7

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The unending legal battle over the Jack Kerouac estate gives perspective to what often happens to the heirs of artists. While Jan Kerouac (Jack’s daughter) is denied entrance to Kerouac symposiums, Paul Blake (Jack’s nephew and intended heir) lives out of his truck in the streets of Sacramento, California. And, as it should be. It isn’t a good idea for artists, or people genetically predisposed to be at risk for creativity, to have money or influence. Far better they don’t. Artists are whining and irresponsible. No purchasing power, no insurance, and no justification for being—so why not legislate this social blight out of existence? The United States is no longer such a young nation that it needs to cultivate an identity through ongoing artistic pursuits. We’ve had artists in this country for 300 years, and even if there wasn’t a new writer or painter or sculptor or actor for, oh, one hundred years (by no accident was the copyright extended to ninety-five years), it’s hard to imagine that anyone would notice the difference. There’s plenty of cheap art and writing by dead people, and nobody would have any trouble finding new sources to exploit. In a pinch, there’s always Shakespeare. That said, it’s unlikely that corporations would need anything new. Look to the current publishing industry, which profits almost entirely from peddling its backlist, or the museum community, which is increasingly subsidized by corporations heavily invested in “great masters,” and which has turned markedly away from living artists in favor of dead ones. Everyone knows there won’t be another Picasso or Dostoevsky, and that all those pretentious jokers out there painting paintings or writing books are just dilettantes who haven’t the slightest clue what they’re doing. The only laudable endeavor that such an “artist” might take on would be to get permission from the Margaret Mitchell estate to write an official sequel to the official sequel of Gone With The Wind.1 Still, while it’s probably a better policy to just to put an end to the arts altogether, one might reach a compromise. One might say, yes, artists will be permitted to continue working, but only in jail. (Most artists are so destitute that they would readily agree to the stipulation.) In the case of music, this arrangement could prove especially productive. With VH1’s “Music Behind Bars” televising of the all-felon band Dark Mischief, it’s clear enough that musicians thrive in jail. Theater critics everywhere are raving about the Shakespeare dramas staged yearly at the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange, Kentucky, which also goes to show how well artists and criminals can get along, if it proved too complicated to jail them separately.2 There will be the parsing of who is and who isn’t an artist, and some will insist that movies have nothing to do with the arts. This sort of detail can easily be worked out with a common-sense distinction: actors could remain on the 1 2

The unofficial sequel/satire: Alice Randall. The Wind Done Gone. HarperCollins, 2001.

Theodor W. Adorno. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, 1951: “Every work of art is a crime not committed.”

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streets, as long as they don’t write or direct anything, and work as waiters or waitresses. Cinephiles need not panic—ask any producer—as we don’t need writers or directors to make movies. And one might point to the technological advances toward computer-animated entertainers, which will eliminate the degenerate profession of acting. What about fashion? Well, designers could be judged case by case. Martin Margiela? Jail. Kathy Ireland? No, no need to jail her. Jean Paul Gaultier? Parole. And what about people who are secretly creative? A huge percentage of the population harbors fantasies of writing novels and such. But one must remember that people also have criminal impulses all the time, and yet we only jail them if they act on their criminal impulses, as it would be Orwellian to prosecute thought crime. Artistic wannabes are no different. And once all artists are behind bars, it’s likely that many artistic daydreams will disappear, or be pushed so deep into the unconscious that they’re just as good as disappeared. Those who do act on artistic impulses are another matter. They can’t pay rent. They can’t feed or take care of themselves. Jellyfish-like, they fall victim, said Freud, to an unsatisfied libido, which results in their indulging themselves in fantasy worlds, which results in narcissistic, neurotic, anti-social, foolish behavior. Many New Yorkers are aware that over the last several years, these issues have led to a sticker and t-shirt campaign to “Kill All Artists.”3 That would help too, certainly. But shouldn’t we at least try to rehabilitate them? Torture and execution might be inevitable. Particularly in the cases of the really miserable creatures, who have a tendency to turn into psychopathic serial killers. (Been to the Chelsea galleries lately? John Wayne Gacy never looked so good. Sick. Sick. Sick. Why are those people so unpleasant?). Okay, you say—but what about the costs? Here lies the true beauty of the system. You put artists in jail, and have them work in total isolation, and then sell their creations, and never reveal who among their ranks is important, and who isn’t. Either that, or you wait till they’re dead. Regardless, artists would be, for lack of a better word, enslaved, and, by that step, taxpayers and prisons would profit. So, beseech lawmakers: put an end to obnoxious, confusing cocktail party comments. Cease the assault on great artists of the past, who did it already. We’ve got Elvis. We’ve got Shakespeare. We’ve got Shirley Temple. Here in

3 The common “Kill all artists” motif of the 1990s harkens to the 1930s and Nazi cultural appraisals of “degenerate art,” and before that to Marxist estimations of art of bourgeoise. As Florence Deshon wrote to Max Eastman in 1920: “A Russian professor from San Francisco is here lecturing on painting. … We met him later and he was surprisingly conservative. Very much afraid that the Revolution: would kill all artists.” Florence Deshon, Max Eastman, and Charlie Chaplin. Love and Loss in Hollywood. Indiana University Press, 2021.

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America, things are great the way they are. And, frankly, it’s un-American to disagree.

Note D. This New York Press piece was one of several satirical takes I published on the subject at the time. For example, there was “Shitty Mickey,” in the winter 2003 edition of The Brooklyn Rail : Recently, I was afforded the opportunity of interviewing Mickey Mouse at his Chelsea art complex. In a spartan loft of 6000 square feet, the Marlon Brando of the mouse world sat in a warm buttermilk bath and sipped papaya smoothies (excellent for the bowels) while we discussed his most recent body of work, which surrounded us. The colorful sculptures came in all shapes and sizes. From simple, abstract conical mounds, to large splattered globs, to flattering busts of famous Johns (John F. Kennedy to John Belushi). John Reed: Mickey, what a wonderful chance this is for people to get to know the real mouse. Mickey Mouse: Yes, I often think how exceedingly difficult it must be to get a sense of my importance through just my films—and I so rarely give interviews, as I can only sustain my enlightened state of awareness by way of a quiet, contemplative life, rich with meditation and illuminated stupors. And if, of course, the audience of the Earth can only glean the most transient sense of my holiness through my movies, it must do them a great deal of good, anyway. Reed: What is the secret to your amazing longevity? You must be nearing eighty, which, as I understand it, is quite advanced for a— Mouse: Seventy. It’s all about quality healthcare. As it stands now, mouse health care is extraordinarily evolved. The testing process for mice, in terms of therapies, medicines, etcetera, is far more developed than it is for humans. If a mouse receives the very best in the way of proper medical attention, he might expect to live forever. And that’s true, btw, because mice are foremost supporters of the medical establishment— and the medical establishment can’t afford to lose me, as the world’s preeminent mouse. Reed: You mean you sell a lot— Mouse: Of plastic, candy, soda, and so forth. But the medical industry owes a great deal to mice, not only because of my candy and soda, but because of Lyme disease and the Hantavirus and the Bubonic plague, and, moreover, because the general social theory of mice, as applied to humans—that a species can live anywhere, on any food supply, in any level of toxicity/adversity—has been a well-spring of surgical and medicinal necessities, and, henceforth, applications. Reed: Aside from your excellent health and prospects, as of the Sonny Bono 1998 copyright extension, you’ve been made a protected species, virtually in perpetuity.

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Mouse: Yes, as of the Sonny Bono bill, I won’t become public domain in 2004, but will remain protected under the new copyright law. Reed: Which is currently being challenged in the Supreme Court. Mouse: But that challenge will fail. And that means, pretty much, that I’ll be around until the sun burns out. And with all the helpful Disney lawyers and all the helpful non-Disney lawyers who don’t want to do anything that might spark a lawsuit, as that would be expensive, and require they rise from their leather couches, in the current, and probably permanent state of things, well, not only am I immortal, nobody can even make fun of me. Reed: How do you feel about being emblematic of the total impunity afforded large corporations? Let’s take, as an example, your own adaptation of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Mouse: Hugo would have loved it. Reed: Why? Mouse: Because audiences loved it. We tested and tested, and our boards finally came up with exactly what the target market wanted to see. No individual could do that. Our Quasimodo was cuddly. Reed: The subversion of an individual’s— Mouse: Individuals die. Corporations don’t die. Reed: Like Walt, you mean—corporations continue to exist, unchanging, in perpetual stasis. Come to think of it, that harkens to your own untouchable, immortal state. Would you draw a parallel— Mouse: I’m not immortal like Walt. Nobody had to freeze me. And nobody’s gonna have to thaw me out. I can lick the back of my own knee if I want to—you call that frozen? Besides, even when he was alive, Walt was just my hand puppet. I had my forepaw so far up his— Reed: Ehem. Mouse: This is nothing. You’re the one who asked the stupid question. You think you’re going to rattle me? You should have seen the time I sold the flammable pajamas to toddlers. I’ve got balls the size of my own head. Look. Reed: Yes, uh, they are big, comparatively—but isn’t that just because you’re an animated figure, and you can have whatever you want? Mouse: I’m not animated, I’m real, ask Wall Street. I live and change and there’s no reason to make fun of me in the first place. You make fun of me, you’re probably out of it anyway. Reed: People worry about machines taking over life on Earth, but maybe the real threat is animated figures. You’re like a higher form of life—you reproduce more easily, live forever, get loved and respected like a living being, and yet suffer no moral or physical consequences for anything. You can kick anyone—push anyone off a moving train. You can eat a whole cake if you want to. In some ways, you, as a representation of Disney, truly are a kind of divine mouse. God and mouse—everywhere

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and nowhere, free and yet totally dependent on the laziness and waste of others. And, best of all, as supreme vermin—no glue traps. Mouse: I told you I’m real. And if that’s some kind of threat about the glue traps, let me tell you—nobody sets glue traps for me. You set a glue trap for me, that’s punitive, and nobody wants a punitive judgment as far as The Mouse is concerned. Nobody messes with The Mouse. Reed: Yes, I’d agree that’s a fair assessment. And, in a genuine sense, you are real. Did you know that in the Nineteenth century corporations were afforded the rights of individuals? Mouse: Enough about the damn corporations, the damn copyright law, and your damn campaign of disinformation. I thought this was going to be about my art. If this isn’t in Artforum, I’m gonna sue. Reed: Uh, how about The Brooklyn Rail ? Mouse: What the hell is that? Reed: The Brooklyn Rail ? Oh, I don’t know. I’ve published a couple of reviews in The Rail and I’ve been surprised by not only the number of people, but the number of really good people who read it. Mouse: Yeah, well, I better get the cover. Reed: That’s really not up to me, but I’ll mention it to Phong and Ted. Mouse: What? Who are they? And get me their social security numbers. And just forget plugging your stupid knock off of Animal Farm. Reed: Snowball’s Chance. Mouse: Jail, buddy, that’s where you belong. Anyone who wants to be a writer, anyone who wants to be an artist, they should have to get a license, which could get taken away at a moment’s notice. You have to have a license to do everything else, and a creative person is more careless and destructive than a drunk driver. Frankly, I think it should be illegal to be an artist at all. Reed: I see, but don’t you consider yourself— Mouse: Not me, you moron. Everyone else. And I want approval on the text in this “interview.”. Reed: Okay. Mouse: Run it by my lawyers. Reed: Okay. Mouse: Hey, wise guy, try asking this question—in what ways are you, Mickey Mouse, the most influential artist this century? In what ways does your latest, brilliant sculptural expression bring yet more enlightenment to a planet you have already brought enlightenment? Reed: All right, what of it? Mouse: Well, I developed film, obviously, and animation, and special effects—almost entirely on my own. Music as well. Consider what we did

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for Rock n’ Roll on The Mickey Mouse Show. Certainly the music video—I had fully reconciled music and image in the 1930s. And art—figurative, and abstract. Just look at Fantasia. That says it all. From that source alone, you could trace almost all of contemporary culture. From MTV to Jackson Pollack. Reed: What about Walt, didn’t he— Mouse: Without me, Walt wouldn’t even be a hunk of ice. By the way, Marc Quinn owes me big time on that. Reed: Hm, you think so? Mouse: I’m working with excrement and pigment, much in the same method that I have for all of my animated pieces. (Incidentally, I’ve always had that technique on the table, and I’m investigating whether artists such as Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Franz West, Tony Labatt, Chris Ofili, John Miller, Wim Delvoye and Piero Manzoni don’t owe me royalties.) It’s an organic process of intake, digestion, and yield. The medium has always been crucial to me, and I’ve always spread it literally throughout my projects—as a kind of fertilizer in which the viewer might take root. But now, I’m looking for a more pure art. All excrement. Next, the theme park. Reed: That’s heavy. Mouse: Now, ask me about my influences. And be sure to print it just the way I say it—I mean, that should be easy for a plagiarist like you, but you never know. Reed: Whatever you say. Mouse: You’re darn tootin’. Reed: Please, go on. Mouse: Right, then. Influences. As for myself, I studied alongside Anthony Quinn, under Picasso. As for influences—Andy Warhol, Mathew Barney, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. All totally influenced by my work. And totally derivative, I might add. Looking back at this period, the only other artists of any merit will be David Bowie, David Byrne, Paul McCartney, Johnny Rotten, and maybe, Sylvester Stallone, who made some pretty important paintings when he was— Reed: Not to be a rumormonger, but what about the 1994 article in Star Magaz— Mouse: I am not a rat. Reed: But straight-up, Mickey, you must be tipping the scales at twelve pounds. Mouse: Listen, I’m too important to be a rat. You, you’re a rat, and that’s pretty good. Most of the global population is maggots, and those are only good for between-meal snacks. Me, I’m so damn important that I can be whatever I damn well please. Reed: Aha. Lastly—and I must say your nose does seem a little smaller lately—what about the rumors that you had an eye enlargement as early

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as 1940, and that, as of 1985, you’ve been sharing a plastic surgeon with Michael Jackson? Mouse: No, untrue, and as far as I know Michael hasn’t had any surgery either—though he does give excellent sleepovers. And, just the record, I gave him his first sleepover back in the late 70s when we briefly brought The Mickey Mouse Club back to prime time. Returning to the subject of cosmetic surgery—you know, I lived in Hollywood a long time, and for all the talk in the tabloids, the only celebrity that I know of who, notwithstanding the gossip, really has had some work is Pinocchio. And that was just a little shave of a nose job—back when he was still made of wood. It was a real thing, a medical problem. “The Pinocchio Syndrome.” Google it. Reed: And on a more personal note, how’s Minnie? Mouse: Actually, that’s a common misconception. We’ve been replacing Minnie with a new mouse about every four months since— Reed: Is that so? Mouse: Yes, to be perfectly honest, we’ve got a whole new litter to choose from in the back. Reed: But what about the males? Mouse: Don’t you know anything about mouse fathers? Reed: You mean? Mouse: Yes, occasionally one hankers after more than a maggot.

2011: The Politics of Narrative December 6, 2011

The first lie: money. The second: property (and borders). The third: government. The fourth: story. Rome, Fourth century AD. Sprawling, ungovernable. Information—roads, religion—unstoppable. Government was no longer enough to manage the governed. Rome’s solution: religion. Constantine’s Christianity insisted that Jesus returned from the dead in body, not just in spirit. The distinction is important; the apostles who saw Jesus in the flesh (not in a vision or a dream) legitimize the church hierarchy, which in turn legitimizes government, property, and capital. Constantine’s second adaptation of Christianity: confession. The “sin, suffering, redemption” story, as told through the story of Jesus, and as exercised in confession, is a mechanism of control; when people suffer, they’re taught to presume they deserved their suffering (sin), and to believe that through atonement (the intervention of external authority) their problems will go away. To this day, sin, suffering, redemption is the primary Western story, in movies, in television, in cross-cultural memoirs (which must accept the Western story to be culturally significant), and in fiction. Harvey Pekar, in his recent collection, Huntington, West Virginia on the Fly 1 puts a percentage to the equation: 99% of what we encounter is establishment narrative.

A version of this essay was originally published in The Rumpus. 1

Villard, 2011.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Reed, The Never End, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_8

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In West Virginia and the body of his work, Pekar understands that a story can be told of any of us, without forced structures or prerequisites—because every individual’s life is an allegory of our times, and in the broader sense, existence itself. Pekar is representative of a wave of comics artists who saw potential for graphic novels and comic books that exceeded the reductive narratives of mainstream comic books. Comic books, contrary to assumption, did not come naturally to their present market. The present market—superheroes, crime, and kid stuff—was mandated by the federal government. Pekar rightly discerned the future: the abrading of the fixed comic book narrative. The Comics Code Authority, which came about in 1954 to regulate an art that had been convicted of “poisoning America’s youth,” was gradually compromised by the stateside underground Comix movement of the 60s and 70s, and international forces, 80s forward, of artists from Europe and Asia who weren’t beholden to US regulators. “The comic-book medium,” begins the preamble to the Comics Code, which was voluntarily adopted by publishers, “having come of age on the American cultural scene, must measure up to its responsibilities … to make a positive contribution to contemporary life, the industry must seek new areas for developing sound, wholesome entertainment. … Members of the industry must see to it that gains made in this medium are not lost and that violations of standards of good taste, which might tend toward corruption of the comic book as an instructive and wholesome form of entertainment, will be eliminated.” The Code determined suitable advertising, banned the glamorization of the word “crime,” and banned the words “horror” and “terror” from a comic title. Also banned: profanity, nudity, extreme bloodshed, gore and torture, and overly emphasized sexual organs. In addition, the code delineated narrative: GENERAL STANDARDS 1. Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to imitate criminals. 2. No comics shall explicitly present the unique details and methods of a crime. 3. Policemen, judges, Government officials, and respected institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to create disrespect for established authority. 4. If crime is depicted, it shall be as a sordid and unpleasant activity. 5. Criminals shall not be presented so as to be rendered glamorous or to occupy a position which creates a desire for emulation. 6. In every instance, good shall triumph over evil and the criminal punished for his misdeeds.

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MARRIAGE AND SEX 1. Divorce shall not be treated humorously nor represented as desirable. 2. Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable. 3. Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable behavior shall be fostered. A sympathetic understanding of the problems of love is not a license for morbid distortion. 4. The treatment of live-romance stories shall emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage. 5. Passion or romantic interest shall never be treated in such a way as to stimulate the lower and baser emotions. 6. Seduction and rape shall never be shown or suggested. 7. Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden. In July of 2010, forty years after the premier issue of Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix No.1,2 Harvey Pekar passed away. The comics world, yearning for creative heroes, for champions of artistic freedom, mourned the loss—unaware that the year to come would bring a historical triumph. In January 2011, DC and Archie Comics, the last two publishers conforming to CCA guidelines, announced their withdrawal from the regulatory process; they would no longer submit their materials for review; and they would no longer carry the CCA seal of approval. The code was defunct. A half century, but the reactionaries had lost: comics didn’t have to be pulp; the stories could come from life, as opposed to edict. The distinction—from life or from edict—happens to be the customary distinction of the literary v. the non-literary work. The logic: – In literary works, the structure is derived from the content. – In non-literary works, the content is derived from the structure. (A Harlequin novel has prescriptions as to action: on page 62, this has to happen.) Though arguably rooted in the arts and religions of antiquity, the twentieth century drew the distinction with modernism, which advanced a structurefollows-content argument. While literary novels of “traditional” or “proven” or “received” structures continued to have a place in American letters, the momentum shifted: lengthy, sprawling novels tended toward the mass market, while sharpened, structure-conscious novels tended toward literature. The 100,000-word novel was more likely to be “fiction,” and the 75,000-word novel was more likely to be “literature,” an inversion of nineteenth-century standards. 2

Apex Novelties, 1968.

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With the beginning of the twenty-first century, the sprawling literary novel has regained pre-eminence. The realist recoil is cyclical—Saul Bellow springs to mind as indicative of a generation that tended toward socially engaged novels of nebulous structure. In the larger political context, the “realist” novel indicates conservative values. The novel that puts content second to structure parallels a nation (a globe) that espouses an ideology of the systemic over the sovereign. To maintain that content comes before structure is a precept for revolution: a particular idea, person, or solution comes before the nation, the corporation, and the praxis. Max Brand (Frederick Schiller Faust), a prolific pulp western writer of the 1920s and 30s, maintained that there were two types of stories: coming home or leaving home. The assertion neatly correlates to the classical definition of comedy and tragedy, as well as a content-first v. structure-first division of the arts. The coming home story (usually comedic or “feel good”): the cowboy accepts and/or is accepted by society. The leaving home story (usually tragic or “dark”): the cowboy rejects and/or is rejected by society. Structure-first stories, i.e., coming home, tend to be about assimilation, while content-first stories, i.e., leaving home, tend toward dissent. The difficulty of reading a text that puts forth a dissenting structure is that it is self-aware. The sentence-to-sentence qualifications, and the adjustments to expected language and idiom, place readers in unfamiliar territories. In counterpoint, the assimilative text is necessarily unconscious of its own intentions. The conformist can’t “try.” (The grade school realization: you can’t try to be normal, in the trying, you’re abnormal.) The conformist story, i.e., the “coming home,” must assume that the state of conformity is the norm. The hero gains acceptance, which is “better.” To acknowledge that a conformist state must be gained, or acquired, is to acknowledge that the conformist state is as difficult to attain as some other alternative state. In the context of literature, the acknowledgment would be tantamount to acknowledging that the structures commonly perceived as “easy” or “naturalistic” are only so because readers have been guided, or indoctrinated, to them. The conformist narrative presumes the state of conformity is baseline, tabula rasa. For example, a look at a novel that espouses passivity: people’s wounds and illnesses begin to glow, the evolution of the world. The message is de facto: sin, suffering, redemption. Through suffering, we will be redeemed. Not necessarily so, but that is the promise of an establishment seeking passivity from a suffering population. Kevin Brockmeier, the author of the novel, The Illumination,3 would no doubt defend the work—say it was about something else. He would be right; novels are about more than one thing. But the promise, “wait for something to change; it will be beautiful,” is the fundamental message. Total conformity, as emptiness and freedom itself, is such a work’s unspoken ideal.

3

Doubleday, 2012.

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In defense of the “realist” novel, the draw is partly an answer to the modern cacophony—a long novel can provide us with silence we’ve lost—and partly a mechanism of publishers. The “big six” (Hachette, HarperCollins, MacMillan, Penguin, Random House, Simon & Schuster)4 are corporate lifestyle brands, forced to contend with a lifestyle market (newspapers, magazines, directed by advertising), and, broadly generalizing, their fiction satisfies a hunger to selflegitimize. The magazine lifestyle is the aspiration, the lesson, and the reward of personal growth and change. Ezequiel Adamovsky’s recent primer, Anti-Capitalism,5 reminds readers that government doesn’t regulate with an intent of progress, but rather with the intent of maintaining the ruling classes as they are. Change only comes about when government is forced to intercede, to protect the establishment from itself, from its own myopia and greed. Assimilationist art, in much the same way, can’t be so mind-blowing that it upsets the order of the Western canon, but neither can it be so terrible that it threatens the life of its delivery system, i.e., the publisher, the magazine that covers it, etcetera. The assimilationist work, as much as it pushes the boundaries of a genre or culture, must validate the collective education of its readers, and give warrant to the modes of its own marketing—the “buy this” of the weekend magazine, for example. The work is, bottom line, antagonistic to originality and/or significant dissent.6 A standing argument of radicals, progressives, and revolutionaries is that compliance is in itself a political act. If your government is engaged in a violent 4

As of the Random House acquisition of Penguin in 2013, the “big five.”

5

Seven Stories Press, 2011.

6

This feedback loop of advertising and propagandistic narrative structure was noted by George Orwell in his “London Letter” to Partisan Review of August 29, 1942: “One periodical reminder that things have changed in England since the war is the arrival of American magazines, with their enormous bulk, sleek paper and riot of brilliantly-colored adverts urging you to spend your money on trash. English adverts of before the war were no doubt less colorful and enterprising than the American ones, but their mental atmosphere was similar, and the sight of a full-page ad on shiny paper gives one the sensation of stepping back into 1939. … An extraordinary feature of the time is advertisements for products which no longer exist. To give just one example: the word IRON in large letters, with underneath it an impressive picture of a tank, and underneath that a little essay on the importance of collecting scrap iron for salvage; at the bottom, in tiny print, a reminder that after the war Iron Jelloids will be on sale as before. This throws a sort of sidelight on the strange fact, recently reported by the Mass Observers and confirmed by my own limited experience, that many factory workers are actually afraid of the war ending, because they foresee a prompt return to the old conditions, with three million unemployed, etcetera. The idea that whatever happens old-style capitalism is doomed and we are in much more danger of forced labor than of unemployment, hasn’t reached the masses except as a vague notion that “things will be different”. The advertisements that seem to have been least changed by the war are those for theaters and patent medicines. Certain drugs are unobtainable, but the British have lost none of their old enthusiasm for medicine-taking, and the consumption of aspirin, phenacetin, etcetera has no doubt increased. All pubs without exception sell aspirins, and various new proprietary drugs have appeared. One is named Blitz, the lightning pick-me-up.”

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act, you are complicit in that act; you have committed an act of violence. The argument stands in the arts: all art is political—if you think your art isn’t political, you’re more than likely producing establishment propaganda.7 McKenzie Wark, in his recent The Beach Beneath the Street,8 traces, as per his subtitle, The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of Situationist International. The Situationist International artist collective sought to establish an art outside capitalist valuation. In Art Gangs: Protest & Counterculture in New York City,9 Alan W. Moore documents radical artists and artists collectives of New York City, 60s–80s. The common thread of the two books, and expanse of the movements they cover: creativity is freedom; commerce is bondage. The cost of the fine arts, in an exact equation, is the price the arts communities demand to suppress dissent, to make work just subversive enough to maintain exclusivity (yet not subversive enough to present any real danger or inconvenience to existing infrastructures). Often, one hears disparaging remarks about contemporary arts: “I could do that;” “an elephant could do better.” The attitude is precisely the stuff of upholding exclusivity; if the work is understood by everyone, it can’t be worth much. Exclusivity is the test of “comprehension.” Do you understand the work, or are you beneath it? This class regulation is different from the factors that govern the publishing world. However remote, books still have the potential to make money; reaching a large audience, i.e., everyone understands, is the most favorable circumstance. Depending on the audience, there is more or less of an appeal to pretension—that this book appeals to an exclusive buyer. The trick of the last thirty years has been to market up—ascribe a mass-audience title with the pretension of the midlist, and a midlist title with the pretension of a literary title. The result has been the erosion of commonly held distinctions and the exclusion of literary titles from major publishers. Some of the bigger publishers will still occasionally publish a literary title to reinforce the overall literariness, or perceived literariness, of their lists. That terrific titles slip through the corporate gateways is undeniable—finding those books is another matter.10 7 If Orwell is our counterpoint, we should note the fragility of the argument that consciousness of the act of propaganda is exculpatory. Orwell’s collaboration with the British Secret Service and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, justified as knowing actions, are only the more reprehensible. In retrospect, the logic of “I knew what I was doing,” doesn’t look like an excuse, it looks like evidence of guilt. Orwell, in example: “All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what one is doing, and why” (Diaries, March 13, 1942). Far from offering sainthood, a discerning understanding of propaganda begets accountability. 8

Verso Books, 2015.

9

Autonomedia, 2011.

10

George Orwell. “As I Please.” Tribune, June 9, 1944: “The literary papers of several well-known papers were practically owned by a handful of publishers who had their quislings planted in all the important jobs. These wretches churned forth their praise— ’masterpiece,’ ‘brilliant,’ ‘unforgettable’ and so forth—like so many mechanical pianos. A book coming from the right publishers could be absolutely certain not only of favorable reviews, but of being placed on the ‘recommended’ list.”

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Movements like Situationist International, or Moore’s NYC “Art Gangs,” or the Underground Comix movement were reliant on popular access to alternative sources of information, which they had, in the form of alternative press. Last year saw a crop of books chronicling the schizoid travails of today’s newspapers and the social triumphs of newspapers of yore. (My approximate list: David Bajo’s Panopticon from Unbridled Books, John Macmillion’s Smoking Typewriters from Oxford, Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists from The Dial Press, David Kindred’s Morning Miracle from Doubleday, and Sarah Ellison’s War at The Wall Street Journal from HMH.11 ) In our own era, the information diffusion of the internet leaves us with more than enough in the way of alternative outlets of information, but no solidarity as to what information and what perspective on the information is most exigent.12 Alternative thinkers often agree: the overlap of the far right, the far left, the libertarians, and the anarchists can be arresting—but the issue of what is most important is a miasma of endless debate. Perhaps the maturation of the internet, the maturation of alternative modes of thought in our own era, will solve the problem; perhaps our optimism should come not from a consensus acceptance of the new, but from the consensus rejection of the old. Today’s model of subscription news/information is questionable fiscally and ethically. Even at The New York Times , the success/failure of the paywall is open for debate. The twentieth-century transition from subscription magazines to subscription magazines laden with advertising was a gradual process, an acquiescence of decades. Content impinged upon by a preponderance of advertising, and compromised by the consumerism of the advertisers. Plus, subscription rates may well be too high a price for not enough, that’s not good enough.13 In the present-day United States, art exists within authorized cultural parameters—there is very little in the way of the “degenerate art” that the Nazis, for example, saw fit to stamp out. The testing of cultural parameters, 11 David Banjo. Panopticon. Unbridled Books, 2010; John Macmillion. Smoking Typewriters. Oxford University Press, 2011; Tom Rachman. The Imperfectionists. The Dial Press, 2011; David Kindred. Morning Miracle. Doubleday, 2011; Sarah Ellison. War at The Wall Street Journal. Harper Business, 2011. 12 George Orwell. “As I Please.” Tribune, April 7, 1944: “Most newspapers remain completely reckless about details of fact. The belief that what is ‘in the papers’ must be true has been gradually evaporating. … Many people frankly say that they take in such and such a paper because it is lively but that they don’t believe a word of what it says.” 13 George Orwell. “As I Please.” Tribune, April 7, 1944: “The unbearable silliness of English newspapers from about 1900 onward has had two main causes. One is that nearly the whole of the Press is in the hands of a few very big capitalists who are interested in the continuance of capitalism and therefore in preventing the public from learning to think; the other is that peacetime newspapers live off advertisements for consumption goods, building societies, cosmetics and the like, and are therefore interested in maintaining a ‘sunshine mentality’ which will induce people to spend money. Optimism is good for trade, and more trade means more advertisements. Therefore, don’t let people know the facts about the political and economic situation; divert their attention to giant pandas, channel swimmers, royal weddings and other soothing topics.”

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contraction and expansion, is ongoing, but anything wildly obstreperous is relegated to obscurity, or at best, to an object of marginal or local curiosity. In comparison to the United States of the 60s, we are pitifully apathetic and square, though perhaps we should be relieved that degeneracy is no longer a presumption of radicalism, given what a drug culture did to undo the decade of peace and love. As London riots,14 as Wall Street is occupied,15 news outlets chorus conservative refrains: the actions aren’t political in nature—the ranks are filled by thugs and criminals, or uninformed flakoids who can’t muster a demand. In the 70s, the US media resorted to such surmises of counterculture, effectively diffusing the radical agenda. Today, however, whether or not people believe that the London rioters are thugs and criminals, or that the Wall Street rioters are without impetus, there’s no indication that thugs or flakoids are the foundation of alternative thinking. There are way too many of us, and we’re not just cultural dropouts. Unlike the alternative future of the 60s and 70s, which seemed to be taking shape on the outskirts of society, today’s alternative future arises from wholesale disgust. The “counterculture” may be entirely ignored, but even the establishment is grumbling with dissatisfaction. Writers who are deeply invested in the espoused Western Story can’t help but wonder if there isn’t something more interesting than regurgitating economically approved platitudes. In the curious performance of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes,16 Foer literally cuts, die cuts, into his “favorite book.” The act of canon worship was unsurprising, but the aggression with which Foer tore into his subject left the media tepid and unreceptive to their epiphanic darling. The London-based publisher, Visual Editions, is a small press with the seemingly unimpeachable small-press stake in future; we can do books better, we can bring about a better world for readers and writers and creative culture at large. In 30 under 30,17 Starcherone Books offered 2011 its promise of the future. The “anthology of innovative fiction” compiled thirty authors under thirty years of age. The unoriginal conceit—always a cause for warmth and dew-eyed optimism. With its frenetic pace, and glimmers of brilliance, 30 Under 30 delivers on the covenant of youth. But the under-30 generation’s betrayal of creative freedom is already underway: the big six are taking on the authors who are most likely to adjust to mainstream margins. And unfortunately, the authors who exhibit the fortitude, or bad fortune, to stay with the small presses will encounter the same restrictions that they would have 14 Following the death of Mark Duggan, who was gunned down by police on August 4, 2011, a series of riots sprang up in London and throughout the nation, which saw protests, looting, arson and five deaths in total. 15 The Occupy Wall Street movement commenced on September 17 in New York City’s lower Manhattan; the local movement extended for two months, and marked a new age of protest for the American and Global Progressivism. 16 17

Visual Editions, 2010.

Blake Butler. 30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Young Fiction Writers. Starcherone Books, 2011.

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faced if they had crossed over to the dark side. With age, small presses tend to mimic the big presses, producing books identical to those of their larger, more powerful counterparts—the differences are more than often token distinctions, some aspect of design, for example. As a small press establishes itself, its author pool is increasingly inhabited by mainstream authors, like Foer, who want additional freedoms. And entering the book economy proper, a small press is beholden to whatever big press has taken on its distribution. This isn’t the first time in history the arts have functioned as a countergovernment, a protector of the owner class and its values—exceptions are infrequent, and harbingers of revolutions. For a century, let’s say 1850 to 1950, a dominant form of narrative entertainment was the temperance work: the story with a lesson, which remains a mainstay to this day. Modes of propaganda often become more transparent with time—it takes very little in the way of mental output to perceive the agitprop of 1930s gangster films, or, for example, Reefer Madness .18 But neither are the agendas of our own era particularly cloaked. The ghostwritten autobiographies of personal triumph; the help-yourself-to-riches-and-be-enlightened pseudo-religion/psychology; the xenophobic thrillers; the clamorous adulation for the canon, the corny, and the profitably branded. It’s everywhere. Movies, media, music, advertising, game culture, and award culture: all replete with naked want, and Horatio Alger clichés. Popular entertainment is a helpless, writhing, mega-maggot of selfish desire. Academia, outmoded and provincial, peddles geniuses and nihilists, ignoring contemporary writers of far more immediacy, relevancy, talent, and accomplishment. Education, a leading national industry, saddles promising poor and middle-class youth with onerous debt, thereby fashioning an executive and managerial class beholden to the children of the wealthy. Culture-at-large presumes that writing is torture, art is suffering, and artists are monstrous, or drug-addled, or sick, or disabled, or all that and more (the A&E biography)— in the service of denigrating creative living and creative thinking, which is the single alternative to a life of stultifying obedience. Artists have always been the pets of the rich—from village seer to royal sponsorships. When availed the resources of a culture, artists create in extraordinary ways; think Shakespeare, a man with the backing of the Queen. Infinitely enabled, artists are more remembered than saints and monarchs. But the power of the artist has been reduced to the life of an individual; no longer do schools of artists, the school of Caravaggio for example, prevail through generations. Corporations live for centuries, but the artist lives one short life. It is temporally impossible for creative thinkers to compete with bureaucratic thinkers, represented by corporations and governments, which don’t die. Distilled by the twentieth and twenty-first-century cult of the artist as hero, an artist’s life and output is reduced to a few explanations in a sinsuffering-redemption biography. Any political context is disdained. The work 18

Lawrence Meade. G & H Productions, 1936.

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is “timeless,” is “universal,” or, in other words, casts contemporary dissent as subordinate to storytelling (content follows structure). Three reactions to the inequities of our present creative circumstance: (1) strive to change government and corporations, (2) found alternative corporate models, and (3) reject the authority of government and corporations. Of the options, the first is the only socially approved response; the second option is tolerated as legal if foolish (more often than not, it is foolish; corporations without corporate missions are likely to flounder). Option C, “drop out,” is heavily criticized. When people point to the “failed” revolution of the 60s, and the dropout culture of the 70s, invariably a comment creeps in about how the counterculture stopped trying to change culture, and started trying to make its own culture, which was a dead end. In fact, the important transformations we see today—freecycle, barter, timeshare, and even Craigslist, all that stuff that allows us to not drop out—can be traced to an evolution that began with starting anew. In writing, in publishing, the questions translate: do I “sell out,” do I change the system, or do I take refuge in “alternative” publishing? Most young writers don’t have a clear understanding of the choice. Their book, they say, is radical and mass market. “This will sell!” they tell you. And they may be right, their revolutionary tome might sell, if it were put in front of people— but not only must a book have the potential to sell, it must do so within the corporate mindset (to which the employees are subject) while promoting the lifestyle branding of the media outlets that promote books (the lifestyle branding attracts the audience that attracts the advertisers that makes Vogue Magazine, for example, profitable). Or, our young author will insist that their small publisher is “really in love” with the book, which is going to “blow up,” not understanding that a micro press does not have the ear of the one fiction buyer—yes, there is just one person—for Barnes & Noble. There are exceptions—usually, everyone is naming the same one at a given moment—but there’s often a backstory to the exception (often a sickening backstory), and regardless, an individual example doesn’t mean much. I once had a friend sit in on the writing workshop I lead at The New School, a respected editor and acclaimed author, and he fielded the of-the-moment exception with typical professorial exhaustion, and the reply, “You’d have a better chance of winning the lottery.” In America, the fantasy of professional creativity is freedom. The US reality of professional creativity is one of subservience and unrelenting regulation. Injustice and delay: from the dregs to the stratosphere. For those who do achieve some level of autonomy, the cost is total compromise; in their work, they are to promote assimilation, social passivity, and/or the inane reductivisms of social media. The old saw, “write what you know,” encourages authors to focus on their own biographies, inflamed by advertorial narcissism, which are almost certain to center on their own struggles to assimilate (the homecoming narrative of lifestyle, marketing, and capital). The more unusual or difficult the assimilation—from the circus to the office, let’s say, or from

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the periphery of western culture to Hollywood—the bigger the rewards, in finance and recognition. (Edwidge Danticat addresses the issues directly and indirectly in her 2010 investigation from Princeton University Press, Create Dangerously.)19 An imaginative process, emphasizing creation over memory, the individual over history, is to be discouraged. Alternatives to accepted norms pose a threat; as history demonstrates, with sustenance, with justification, alternative thinkers will soon enough come up with an answer to “what else?” For those who came to writing seeking a course alternate to the American assumption, the conservative bent of American literature, a literature of aggressive complacency, is cause for profound upset. In 1951, Theodor W. Adorno asserted that, “every work of art is a crime not committed.”20 The claim is powerful, not just in its insight, but in its exclusion of creative works made in the service of normative values. Propaganda, and pop culture, are excluded by Adorno’s criteria. Despite the proclamations of the approved textbooks, and the approved four-tomato reviews from the approved pundits, art is disobedience, much as democracy is civil disobedience: the Boston Tea Party, the abolitionists, and the underground railroad, the Civil Rights movement, and the Vietnam protests. And yet, the earlier the civil action, the earlier the opposition, the more courage it took to stand up, the more likely we are to have forgotten our heroes and their deeds. Civil disobedience, the rage against the machine—is a long history of lost, unremembered, and erased battles. Independent thought, originality, have to be their own reward, because normative history offers revolutionaries the reward of oblivion or villainy. It is often difficult to find truth in the presumption that history is a march forward. Recent decades, in the United States and the world, may well make an argument to the contrary. The war against Rome is seemingly unwinnable, and yet, sometimes when I glance around a room—at a reading, at an opening—I am amazed to see that we are all still here, two millennia later, soldiers in the same army, our orders long lost, but our direction still true. We, the Celts, the Christians unblessed by Constantine, the Barbarian hordes, and the theologians of the Protestant Reformation, are here, embodied. As the United States in the 1970s witnessed assassination after assassination, the deaths of student protestors, and the murders (by police) of political activists, a grim warning crept into the vernacular of the counterculture: “They will kill you.” Now, nobody doubts it. If you’re not looking down the gun barrel at a bullet, you’re looking down the gun barrel at debt. But if the lesson of today’s

19

Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Vintage, 2011.

20

Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life.

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culture is to hold on to what you have—to clutch your rapacity—the alternative lesson is to quit cringing. “Shed,” in the words of Philip Berrigan, “your coats of fear.”21 The history of letters, the canon, isn’t immediate enough, isn’t alive enough, and isn’t good enough to make war with oligarchy, art’s natural enemy. To raise Orwell’s 1984, to shake its pages in the face of oppression, is a futile act. What we face is far worse than Big Brother, and each year a hundred new books take up futuristic scenarios infinitely more compelling, varied, and literary than Orwell’s dusty Cold War relic. To yield to literature as is, publishing as is, is to grant the arts a secondary role in life. The arts are our humanity, and creative fulfillment is the answer to our personal woes, our materialistic woes, and even our environmental woes. The creative life is the alternative to feudal bureaucracy. And the literary work, the work deemed hard to read, the work that puts creation before expectation—the work that inspires people to be writers—is more than just an esthetic or an inconvenience. It is the revolution, the revolution in thinking, which is the only kind of revolution. The only kind we can win.

21 Directed and produced by Anthony Giacchino. The Camden 28. First Run Features, 2007.

2016: Pigs, Goats, Tea Parties, Walking Magnets and Scotch Central: John Reed with Bretty Rawson June 27, 2016

Some books double as a matchstick: if struck in the right conditions, they can cause a wildfire. Snowball’s Chance (2002) was one such book. The kindling, however, was immodest: George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). In the three weeks following 9/11, John Reed wrote a riposte to the Cold War fairy tale; the brilliance of Snowball’s Chance is that it expands upon Orwell’s parable to include terrorism, making the story a workable paradigm for the current global context. Immediately, Snowball’s Chance attracted the attention of Orwell’s estate (and their legal team), as well as Christopher Hitchens, Marxists, and war hawks. Far from deterred, Reed was ecstatic. You can imagine, then, how happy Reed was when he discovered that George Orwell ripped Animal Farm straight from Nikolai Kostomarov’s short story “Animal Riot.” This was a dangerous thing to put forth—that the banner of the Cultural Cold War was plagiarized. But if Reed was the first to demonstrate the parallel, he wasn’t the first to suggest it. News of “Animal Riot” hit English headlines in 1988 in The Economist . Reed came to the story in 2002, and, via a mix of internet sleuthing and old-fashioned book-worming, put the pieces together. His findings were presented by Harper’s in 2015 (“Revisionist History”), following up on other long-form work, which Reed had published in The Paris Review (“Animal Farm Timeline”) and The Believer (a heavy annotation of George Orwell’s “The Freedom of the Press”). At completion, the draft of the

A version of this interview was originally published in The Rumpus.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Reed, The Never End, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_9

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Harper’s article rang in at 15,000 words.1 The published piece clipped down to about 4,000 words; Reed’s comparisons and timelines leave little room to doubt that “Animal Riot” was the origin of Animal Farm. For a few hours, I sat down with Reed to talk about soft wars, propaganda, weapons of mass instruction, and censorship in the United States today. Like most conversations I’ve had with Reed, this one begins beyond the beginning, but that seems to be the only place to start if we’re to make our way back through a thick political past. Rawson: When I was reading through your articles, Snowball’s Chance, and thinking about political propaganda, Orwell, and Hitchens, I was struck by how we take certain words or stories, and we literally go to war with them. Reed: That’s true, and Hitchens was a very good example of that. And Hitchens had learned how to do it from Orwell, who had learned how to do it through the course of a real war—several real wars—and a cold war, and the subsequent involvement with the Congress for Cultural Freedom; really, what was the most successful Cold War campaign against the Russians. Orwell took a turn to the right at the end of his life, which people often apologize for, saying he was in love with a young, beautiful woman.2 I think he was hopeful that he could outsmart his right-wing bedfellows. He might have if he had survived. His environmental stance was developing, and that was another avenue for him to explore—the more progressive side of himself. He resisted many of the ways that Animal Farm was being put forward, as well as 1984. Hitchens, too, I think, was under the impression that his turn to the right was something he could manage. Rawson: Hitchens? Reed: Hitchens made his own turn to the right and became war hawkish in exactly the same way as Orwell had become war hawkish as World War II progressed. Hitchens liked glamor and didn’t make an effort to struggle against the tide. He just kind of went with it. Rawson: Orwell didn’t live much longer after his turn though, right? Reed: No, he didn’t live long after—only a few years. Rawson: Whereas Hitchens did, right? Reed: He lived a little longer. He died in 2011; the blue pill took about ten years to put him down. Orwell died in less than five; his political apostasy was longer coming and he was never well, and he had been shot. But yeah, it does feel like each perished of personal toxicity; Hitchens maybe lived longer, and Orwell’s turn was more justified—if grander and more pernicious. In the 40s, when it was very sketchy to be defending Russia, there was quite a bit in the way of an intellectual defense of Russia. Orwell was not going to abide an argument that excused Stalin. He’d been sort of war hawkish before, but he turned the corner. East v. West. He saw the coming terrain at a very 1 Versions of these publications, including the longer version of the Harper’s piece, are included in these pages. 2

D. J. Taylor. “Brief encounters and romps in the park.” The Critic, March 2020.

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early juncture. Thinking about Bertrand Russell’s writing, you can see they had already figured out that propaganda was the preferred solution. Hitchens did not have a good argument—weapons of mass destruction were about the best argument3 he had, which is pretty pathetic. But Hitchens had been denied for a long time. If you take Alex Cockburn as a counterpoint, the way we control the message in the United States is not to censor people, it’s to ignore them. Orwell was very aware of that. There are two kinds of writers for these broad market “sophisticate” venues: there are writers who don’t know that they’re producing propaganda, and there are writers who are willing to play ball. What they write probably isn’t outright propaganda, but they do just enough, which is what these venues want. Every once in a while you can push something over the edge. That’s how Orwell was playing with the newspapers. Rawson: That’s interesting what you say about censorship and ignoring, especially if you think about the media and Trump. Their attention adds gasoline to his wildfire. Reed: Well yeah, and Trump appeals to ignorance. There’s always been a trend of know-nothing parties, or Tea Parties, or whatever you want to call them—political parties that are primarily interested in your lack of understanding. They seduce you with your own stupidity. That’s a very popular party in the United States. [Laughs] It always has been. It always has been. Rawson: Aren’t they just walking magnets? Reed: Magnets? Rawson: Yeah, they seem to always attract sameness, or could care less about what they’re attracting, but just that they are. Reed: I don’t think Trump or Bernie are about intelligent reactions. It’s very clear watching Bernie versus Hillary that Hillary knows much, much more. They’re diametrically opposed—Bernie and Trump—but they’re angry. They’re angry about something and that’s why we like them. Emotional identification. Rawson: Going back to the idea of the two kinds of writers and propaganda—if Hitchens, for example, wasn’t previously accepted or revered, one way to become more revered is to become that weapon. It seems there is a parallel between the intensity of their words and the intensity to which they are used by other people. If Orwell had the idea that he was still going to control his message but then dies, then what happens? He becomes a tool, and the government moves in. Reed: Yes, and they did. The government moved right in. Really quickly, they controlled the message. I doubt Orwell would’ve sold the film rights. He certainly wouldn’t have given them to the military. 3 Broadly addressed. For example: Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith. “False Pretenses.” The Center for Public Integrity, 2008; The George Bush administration made at least 532 false statements justifying the US invasion of Iraq on the basis of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction.

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Rawson: Do you think at some point Orwell would have ever mentioned that Animal Farm was largely influenced by Kostomarov’s short story, “Animal Riot”4 ? Reed: I think that if it had come out, he would have owned it, but no one caught him. The way he resourced his books—he was a journalist with a journalistic approach to research. He went after everything. He was not intimidated, he was not afraid of pillaging—the list of books he pillaged for 1984 is extensive. He was fairly transparent about that, but he was only forthcoming when pressed. The story, of course, of the genesis of Animal Farm is a rehash of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s instigating event in Crime and Punishment .E Orwell wasn’t even trying. I think he expected someone to cite Kostomarov eventually, and then he would say that he read it. I don’t know if there were rights issues, but it’s possible “Animal Riot” was still copyrighted at that time. Rawson: And on the issue of copyright, Snowball’s Chance came fifty-eight years after Animal Farm, whereas Animal Farm came thirty-nine years after “Animal Riot,” so it’s interesting people accuse you, but not him, since Orwell was closer to copyright infringement. Reed: That’s true. In Russia, it’s copyright by locale, so “Animal Riot” would have been subject to multiple, geographically distinct copyrights—all of which is incredibly confusing. I doubt that anybody would have been able to sort it out—the laws were complete chaos. But, yes, it was quite possible that “Animal Riot” was under copyright law when Orwell wrote Animal Farm. I don’t know—he might have come clean if someone had talked to him. The other thing is that Orwell’s Animal Farm is better than Kostomarov’s “Animal Riot.” Orwell was a skilled novelist and he made Animal Farm a good story. Kostomarov just dashed off a thing very quickly. Kostomarov was satisfied with the concept alone. Rawson: This whole writing of a war reminds me of D Is for Deception by Tina Rosenberg,5 which was about World War II, D-Day, and Dennis Wheatley, who wrote a fictitious plot for invading Normandy, which by and large hoodwinked Hitler, and was the only reason it worked. That blew my mind. He was brought in by the government, constructed this enormous plot, took elements from his own novels, and spread pieces of the plot like crumbs. He let the Nazis tell the story—he gave them all the little points, and they put the plot together. It took Hitler seven weeks to send his troops to Normandy because he still thought the real invasion was coming. It’s wild how successful, or strong, a fictional story, or the imagination of fear, can be. I wonder just how big, closed off, and secretive these networks and narratives are. Reed: I think it’s still big. It was once on the CIA website that the Cultural Cold War was the most successful CIA operation of all time. I can’t imagine that they just stepped away from that.

4

The full story, translated by Tanya Paperny, is included in this collection.

5

Tina Rosenberg. “D Is for Deception.” The Atavist, 2012.

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Soft war stuff is inexpensive and doesn’t kill anybody. In a way, it’s a shame we don’t employ it more. Instead of invading Iraq, with the amount of money we spent per person, we could have given everybody an Xbox, a TV, and a computer—probably more than that. Really, just decimate the independent culture. Soft war would have been far more successful, far less expensive, far less murderous than the action undertaken. We do employ soft war tactics, but more indirectly. We have a missionary structure; we send in our artists and creatives to go in and convince whatever the target culture is that the Western model isn’t so bad. After that, we send in economic people and they eradicate the agrarian economy and replace it with a monetary economy so that people are poor. In an agrarian economy, poverty is not monetary—if you have land, you have food, and you have trade, you’re not poor. But when you switch it to a monetary economy, you’re poor. We could have moved into Afghanistan and Iraq with culture—in a big scale way. That’s why the paranoia of non-western culture about the threat of western culture is really not paranoia. Good thing for them we’re relatively inept. Hitchens was trying to finesse the old argument into a new context. A retrofit of Animal Farm, which had suddenly become nonsensical. The Cold War was over and Animal Farm was not something we could apply to terrorism. The allegory showed its seams. Hitchens’ goal was to recontextualize Orwell and the Cold War—and Animal Farm was a part of that—to include a terrorist enemy. I don’t think it was a successful transition. Much of Orwell now feels anachronistic in the context of a present-day Cold War agenda. Rawson: Wasn’t Hitchens sort of just an attack dog? Reed: Yeah, he was doing the dirty work. And he understood what it was— he wanted that attention. There’s a kind of Jews-for-Jesus phenomenon when you go from left to right, you know, and they put you forth. He was very willing to be that. Hitchens liked to have dinner. He liked the big steak, a lot of scotch, and suddenly, he was in Scotch Central, and I think once he sat his ass into that situation, he was not going anywhere. I debated him on the BBC at one point, and it felt so unfair to me afterwards because my mic kept going off. I was not the skilled debater, and the fucking mic kept going off. Juvenile of me to expect otherwise, of course— but it was really confusing. I was in rural Virginia at the time on a phone from 1960—you know, it was a phone one model after the crank phone or something—and we’re on the phone, we’re talking, and I’m realizing my mic isn’t working, and so I’m trying to talk backwards to things. My notes are spread out on the bed and the radio is plugged in on the window sill and I’m on a phone with a cord that doesn’t reach all the way across the room. Afterwards, Hitchens said he owed me a bottle of scotch. He still owes me a bottle of scotch. Someone can send it to me on his behalf. We’re not brutes here. Whiskey or Scotch. Peat or grain.

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We actually had a very cordial relationship. Right after Snowball’s Chance came out, I went to a reading of his, and he denigrated it from the podium. This was at the Great Hall at Cooper Union. And in one of my most thrilling moments as a writer, I got to ask a question at the end and identify myself, and all the octogenarians in the audience kind of gasped and turned around. Rawson: What was your question? Reed: Hitchens said that I was named after The Ten Days That Shook the World John Reed. And I said that was kind of a cheap shot, which it kind of was. I’m not related to that John Reed. He went to Russia for the revolution and was a US socialist. He died in Russia, not happy with himself. He was buried at the Kremlin Wall and was used as a Russian point of Propaganda, anti-western propaganda. Rawson: Did you ask a question or just tell him that’s not true? Reed: I did ask a question. I think a real one. I don’t remember what I asked, precisely. At that time, I wasn’t as knowledgeable about Orwell. I had written Snowball’s Chance on instinct, and came by the historical Orwell stuff later. Rawson: So that was another thing that fascinated me. In the Paris Review timeline, I was surprised to see that The Economist first broke the story of Animal Farm and its connection to “Animal Riot” in 1988. Reed: Yeah. Everyone knew this was a possible antecedent. I found out shortly after Snowball’s Chance came out—the Internet was coming to life, it hadn’t completely come to life—that people knew about this story, “Animal Riot,” but the history hadn’t been explored. People wrote the story off for three reasons: one, people said Kostomarov was unknown, which is just not true, just flat out wrong; two, they said that Orwell wouldn’t have known about “Animal Riot”; and three, they said that the story wasn’t translated. In the Harper’s piece I look at that second question; did Orwell know about Kostomarov and “Animal Riot.” As for translation, probably it was translated; we just don’t have any extant evidence. And Orwell read in French too, where it may have been translated first, and there’s a version I have never located that was written with Tolstoy. Anyway, a lot of the arguments against the correlation seemed like conveniences, or arguments by ignorance. Rawson: Was The Economist article trying to directly link Animal Farm to “Animal Riot,” or did it hint at something softer? Reed: The first place that broke the story was a local-ish newspaper. I don’t remember the exact publication. But then The Economist reprinted it. The newspaper article was powerful because it took two quotes and compared them—they’re the same. In my Harper’s article, I compared huge swaths of text, Animal Farm to “Animal Riot.” It’s unbelievable. They are the same. Paragraph to paragraph, sequentially. There’s just no way that’s a coincidence—to have the same premise, the same order of paragraphs, the same actions. The Economist picked up on a good story.

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Rawson: So people were seeing this back then, but it somehow didn’t compute? I mean, how do you keep the lid on? Did the Orwell estate run a big game to discredit the connection once it came out? Reed: I expected people to be really critical of the Harper’s piece. In the longer version, I covered every possible angle—I read for two years—so I expected people to be critical of the Harper’s piece because, in its final version, it didn’t have everything. It wasn’t even 5,000 words. But everybody just shrugged and said, “yeah.” The Russians of course had already put it all together. I would talk to Russian scholars, and they would say, of course it’s based on “Animal Riot.” But their attitude is that everything is ripped off from Russian culture. I mean, even if it was arguably Ukrainian. In the UK, I bet they still wouldn’t talk about this. Nobody would publish it—Orwell’s a saint. Rawson: Did you first read Animal Farm in school? Was there a political context? Reed: Totally straight-ahead Cold War context, over and over again, in public school. I was taught that this was about the Russians and how shitty they were. I was also shown that the other animals were dumb and the pigs were smart—and this is an underlying problem with Animal Farm: that it assumes class superiority. I was repeatedly given the book and taught that lesson, in exactly the same way. Part of the reason there are fewer Animal Farm defenders today is that it’s no longer an effective Cold War tool—it’s not effective propaganda. My kids don’t even understand what the Cold War idea is—you try to explain to them that there was a Cold War, and they just look at you and say, that’s silly. You can’t make them understand it. When they read Animal Farm, they’re just confused. They don’t have the grounding—the political context—to give weight to what’s going on. As an allegory, it’s highly successful, but my kids are reading Animal Farm as a novella, and they have trouble following the story. Standalone, it struggles to hold together. Rawson: Snowball’s Chance was hysterically intelligent. It ate the bluntness of complexity and was such a digestible story, simply told. Every time a sheep fainted, I laughed in public. But truly, it felt so very fluid, which I imagine might have to do with the fact that you wrote it in three weeks. Reed: I really like that idea, of course, that it’s readable. Maybe I just got lucky because I wrote it so quickly. Rawson: You said you were walking on September 9, 2001, and the title came to you—Snowball’s Chance—but that days later, you realized it would be about Animal Farm. How did these two things come together? Reed: I had the idea walking down the street with my wife. We were on a long block, where there are no street breaks, on Fourth Avenue right after it changes from Lafayette Street. And I said to my wife, “Oh that’s a great title, Snowball’s Chance.” She said, “Meh, you can do better.” She was kind of

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right—the title meant nothing without Animal Farm—but I also knew that I had something. A snowball’s chance in hell? I started asking myself what I was really thinking about. Then, within a day or two, 9/11 happened, and then, within a day or two after that, I realized, oh, Snowball comes back to the farm, and then I had the whole thing. I read Animal Farm so many times as a kid. I only had to work out a couple of problems. There were a few areas in the analogs that required real effort. I think they were all mistakes Orwell made, to be honest; they were problems he left me. Rawson: What kind of problems? Reed: Well, the relationship with the humans. I think the most difficult analog is with the humans—who exactly are the humans? Because they’re not a part of the Animal Farm equation. So for me, extending the metaphor, I inherited that difficulty, but I had to maintain Orwell’s balance of who they were. Also, he made the not-pig animals too dumb. And he didn’t have an intelligentsia class, which was a real flaw. There had to be an intelligentsia class that figured things out for the pigs, so I added the goats. Rawson: It’s interesting to see the reactions. For you, the reaction was obviously intense—being sued by the Orwell estate—but you were also targeted by Hitchens. Did you expect that? Reed: Hitchens was weirdly fairer than other people who criticized me from the right. Oh, and the other people who didn’t like the book were hardcore Marxists. I don’t even understand why they didn’t like it. The people on the far, far left, maybe they adopt Orwell as their ancestor? There were only a few criticisms from the right that were offensive to me. One was this woman writing for The Boston Globe, Cathy Young,6 who said I was blaming the victims of terrorism, which was a big thing back then. But during the course of her criticism, she revealed that she hadn’t read the book. And I thought, you know, whoever published this should have shelved it. Terribly irresponsible. Unfortunately, “journalism” like that has only become more common—people are tripping over themselves to promulgate opinions that are utterly fantastical. Just completely pulled out of thin air. Rawson: In the face of an opposing thought, we declare it to be artifice. Reed: People are so egotistical. They want to maintain the idea that their own existence is bigger than it is, so anything that challenges that can bring out some unpleasant ire. Much of the responsibility lies with editors. If that Boston Globe piece was an assignment, the editor knew the book was not going to be received well by the reviewer. As an editor, you don’t want to run bad reviews because, in the case of a small press book, the cost of printing the review could be higher 6

“Blaming the Victim of Terrorism” appeared in The Boston Globe, December 2, 2002, and was cross-published, the same day, in Reason Magazine, as “Blaming the Victim: Progressives whitewash theocratic fascism.”.

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than the cost of printing the book. But on the flip side, an editor who wants a bad review knows how to get one. In the assignment. What to whom. You see it at every newspaper in this country. Bad pairings. It’s possible that they’re all accidental, but I doubt all of them are accidental. And there’s editorial culpability, whether it’s negligence or not. Rawson: One of your reviewers said you were trying to get rich with Snowball’s Chance by poaching off the Orwell name. Reed: That was a surreal criticism. They also confused me with my father, which was yet more surreal—that you can be a painter who then decides to get rich by writing a small press novel. [Laughs] It’s so out there, you know. Rawson: At any point in the process, John, while you were working on this, did you ever want to say, “Oh well?”. Reed: When I was in public school in New York City, sixty percent of the education was straight brainwashing. It’s acculturation, and that, by the way, is not accidental. That was always a part of the American model of education, which was established as a way to normalize—homogenize—populations from different places. The idea was—and this was the philosophy of the American education system at its inception—schooling has to break the bond with the parents, the home culture, and create a common culture. Furthermore—I don’t know if this was by design, but I think it well could be—after high school, students are taken out of their local environment and shipped away to colleges. You’re removed from your local, political consciousness to break any of the local ties. If we all kept ties to our localities, we would be politically powerful and informed. Schooling is a deliberate shift to a nationalistic consciousness, rather than a local consciousness, which gets right into what they were doing in New York City in 1979 when they were feeding Animal Farm to everyone. And in 2001, I just realized it—this stuff about how all revolutions are failed—that that was the ultimate lesson of Animal Farm: we’re too stupid to take over. Right? I mean, that was not something I wanted to hear in 2001. I mean, when did the Cold War end? We like to say the Cold War ended with the end of the Berlin Wall, but the Cold War ended with 9/11, because the paradigm fell apart. Rawson: Hitting on something you mentioned about place. You have remained largely here. You’ve seen so much pass by. Reed: When I was writing Snowball, my wife and I were in our apartment. The day it happened, people in white dust were walking by. She went out, heading to work, and saw a plane over Broadway and came back to tell me what she saw, and I immediately knew it was some kind of attack. It’s not easy to override all the automatic functions of a big airplane. You have to have wanted to fly over Broadway. I said please let me go back to sleep. When I woke up, they were showing us the crashes over and over again. I grew up down there. When I picked up the phone, my brother was already trying to get down to his stepmother’s store to clean some stuff out, and his father was a couple blocks away. My father was a couple blocks away. It was

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a giant mess, all the fucked-up dust. I ran out and got gas masks and air filters, and taped over the vents on the air conditioner. Every time we left the house, we used the gas masks. I remember talking to a cop. It was easiest to be north of Houston, and then there were barricades. I remember talking to this cop who was working downtown. He was not wearing a mask. My wife and I walked past him; we had these masks on. We were going down to my aunt’s place to have dinner. With this look on his face, he watched us go by. All these people—Giuliani—were lying, saying, “There’s nothing in the air.” And he looked at me with this spooked expression, and said, “Do you know something I don’t?”. But yeah, when I wrote the novel, it was a dust storm outside. Everybody was depressed, but in some ways, it was the best I had ever seen New York City. There were no cars in the street. You just rode your bike down the middle of the street. Rawson: Right, the silence thereafter.

Note E. “On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages. However, the actual details of the story did not come to me for some time until one day (I was then living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.” —George Orwell’s “The Freedom of the Press,” 1945/1972, as compared to the Constance Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment, part 1, Chapter V: Raskolnikov had a fearful dream. He dreamt he was back in his childhood in the little town of his birth. He was a child about seven years old, walking into the country with his father on the evening of a holiday. It was a grey and heavy day, and the country was exactly as he remembered it; indeed, he recalled it far more vividly in his dream than he had done in memory. The little town stood on a level flat as bare as the hand, not even a willow near it; only in the far distance, a copse lay, a dark blur on the very edge of the horizon. A few paces beyond the last market garden stood a tavern, a big tavern, which had always aroused in him a feeling of aversion, even of fear, when he walked by it with his father. There was always a crowd there, always shouting, laughter and abuse, hideous hoarse singing, and often fighting. Drunken and horrible looking figures were hanging about the tavern. He used to cling close to his father, trembling all over when he met them. Near the tavern the road became a dusty track, the dust of which was always black. It was a winding road, and about a hundred paces further on, it turned to the right to the graveyard. In the middle of the graveyard stood a stone church with a green cupola where he used to go to mass two or three times a year with his father

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and mother, when a service was held in memory of his grandmother, who had long been dead, and whom he had never seen. On these occasions they used to take on a white dish tied up in a table napkin a special sort of rice pudding with raisins stuck in it in the shape of a cross. He loved that church, the old-fashioned, unadorned ikons, and the old priest with the shaking head. Near his grandmother’s grave, which was marked by a stone, was the little grave of his younger brother who had died at six months old. He did not remember him at all, but he had been told about his little brother, and whenever he visited the graveyard he used religiously and reverently to cross himself and to bow down and kiss the little grave. And now he dreamt that he was walking with his father past the tavern on the way to the graveyard; he was holding his father’s hand and looking with dread at the tavern. A peculiar circumstance attracted his attention: there seemed to be some kind of festivity going on, there were crowds of gaily dressed townspeople, peasant women, their husbands, and riff-raff of all sorts, all singing and all more or less drunk. Near the entrance of the tavern stood a cart, but a strange cart. It was one of those big carts usually drawn by heavy carthorses and laden with casks of wine or other heavy goods. He always liked looking at those great carthorses, with their long manes, thick legs, and slow even pace, drawing along a perfect mountain with no appearance of effort, as though it were easier going with a load than without it. But now, strange to say, in the shafts of such a cart he saw a thin little sorrel beast, one of those peasants’ nags which he had often seen straining their utmost under a heavy load of wood or hay, especially when the wheels were stuck in the mud or in a rut. And the peasants would beat them so cruelly, sometimes even about the nose and eyes, and he felt so sorry, so sorry for them that he almost cried, and his mother always used to take him away from the window. All of a sudden there was a great uproar of shouting, singing and the balalaïka, and from the tavern a number of big and very drunken peasants came out, wearing red and blue shirts and coats thrown over their shoulders. “Get in, get in!” shouted one of them, a young thick-necked peasant with a fleshy face red as a carrot. “I’ll take you all, get in!”. But at once there was an outbreak of laughter and exclamations in the crowd. “Take us all with a beast like that!”. “Why, Mikolka, are you crazy to put a nag like that in such a cart?”. “And this mare is twenty if she is a day, mates!”. “Get in, I’ll take you all,” Mikolka shouted again, leaping first into the cart, seizing the reins and standing straight up in front. “The bay has gone with Matvey,” he shouted from the cart, “and this brute, mates, is just breaking my heart, I feel as if I could kill her. She’s just eating her head off. Get in, I tell you! I’ll make her gallop! She’ll gallop!” and he picked up the whip, preparing himself with relish to flog the little mare. “Get in! Come along!” The crowd laughed. “D’you hear, she’ll gallop!”. “Gallop indeed! She has not had a gallop in her for the last ten years!”.

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“She’ll jog along!”. “Don’t you mind her, mates, bring a whip each of you, get ready!”. “All right! Give it to her!”. They all clambered into Mikolka’s cart, laughing and making jokes. Six men got in, and there was still room for more. They hauled in a fat, rosy-cheeked woman. She was dressed in red cotton, in a pointed, beaded headdress and thick leather shoes; she was cracking nuts and laughing. The crowd round them was laughing too and indeed, how could they help laughing? That wretched nag was to drag all the cartload of them at a gallop! Two young fellows in the cart were just getting whips ready to help Mikolka. With the cry of “now,” the mare tugged with all her might, but far from galloping, could scarcely move forward; she struggled with her legs, gasping and shrinking from the blows of the three whips which were showered upon her like hail. The laughter in the cart and in the crowd was redoubled, but Mikolka flew into a rage and furiously thrashed the mare, as though he supposed she really could gallop. “Let me get in, too, mates,” shouted a young man in the crowd whose appetite was aroused. “Get in, all get in,” cried Mikolka, “she will draw you all. I’ll beat her to death!” And he thrashed and thrashed at the mare, beside himself with fury. “Father, father,” he cried, “father, what are they doing? Father, they are beating the poor horse!”. “Come along, come along!” said his father. “They are drunken and foolish, they are in fun; come away, don’t look!” and he tried to draw him away, but he tore himself away from his hand, and, beside himself with horror, ran to the horse. The poor beast was in a bad way. She was gasping, standing still, then tugging again and almost falling. “Beat her to death,” cried Mikolka, “it’s come to that. I’ll do for her!”. “What are you about, are you a Christian, you devil?” shouted an old man in the crowd. “Did anyone ever see the like? A wretched nag like that pulling such a cartload,” said another. “You’ll kill her,” shouted the third. “Don’t meddle! It’s my property, I’ll do what I choose. Get in, more of you! Get in, all of you! I will have her go at a gallop!”. All at once laughter broke into a roar and covered everything: the mare, roused by the shower of blows, began feebly kicking. Even the old man could not help smiling. To think of a wretched little beast like that trying to kick! Two lads in the crowd snatched up whips and ran to the mare to beat her about the ribs. One ran each side. “Hit her in the face, in the eyes, in the eyes,” cried Mikolka.

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“Give us a song, mates,” shouted someone in the cart and everyone in the cart joined in a riotous song, jingling a tambourine and whistling. The woman went on cracking nuts and laughing. He ran beside the mare, ran in front of her, saw her being whipped across the eyes, right in the eyes! He was crying, he felt choking, and his tears were streaming. One of the men gave him a cut with the whip across the face, he did not feel it. Wringing his hands and screaming, he rushed up to the grey-headed old man with the grey beard, who was shaking his head in disapproval. One woman seized him by the hand and would have taken him away, but he tore himself from her and ran back to the mare. She was almost at the last gasp, but began kicking once more. “I’ll teach you to kick,” Mikolka shouted ferociously. He threw down the whip, bent forward and picked up from the bottom of the cart a long, thick shaft, he took hold of one end with both hands and with an effort brandished it over the mare. “He’ll crush her,” was shouted round him. “He’ll kill her!”. “It’s my property,” shouted Mikolka and brought the shaft down with a swinging blow. There was a sound of a heavy thud. “Thrash her, thrash her! Why have you stopped?” shouted voices in the crowd. And Mikolka swung the shaft a second time, and it fell a second time on the spine of the luckless mare. She sank back on her haunches, but lurched forward and tugged forward with all her force, tugged first on one side and then on the other, trying to move the cart. But the six whips were attacking her in all directions, and the shaft was raised again and fell upon her a third time, then a fourth, with heavy measured blows. Mikolka was in a fury that he could not kill her at one blow. “She’s a tough one,” was shouted in the crowd. “She’ll fall in a minute, mates, there will soon be an end of her,” said an admiring spectator in the crowd. “Fetch an axe to her! Finish her off,” shouted a third. “I’ll show you! Stand off,” Mikolka screamed frantically; he threw down the shaft, stooped down in the cart and picked up an iron crowbar. “Look out,” he shouted, and with all his might, he dealt a stunning blow at the poor mare. The blow fell; the mare staggered, sank back, and tried to pull, but the bar fell again with a swinging blow on her back and she fell on the ground like a log. “Finish her off,” shouted Mikolka and he leapt beside himself, out of the cart. Several young men, also flushed with drink, seized anything they could come across—whips, sticks, poles, and ran to the dying mare. Mikolka stood on one side and began dealing random blows with the crowbar. The mare stretched out her head, drew a long breath and died. “You butchered her,” someone shouted in the crowd. “Why wouldn’t she gallop then?”.

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“My property!” shouted Mikolka, with bloodshot eyes, brandishing the bar in his hands. He stood as though regretting that he had nothing more to beat. “No mistake about it, you are not a Christian,” many voices were shouting in the crowd. But the poor boy, beside himself, made his way, screaming, through the crowd to the sorrel nag, put his arms round her bleeding dead head and kissed it, kissed the eyes and kissed the lips. Then he jumped up and flew in a frenzy with his little fists out at Mikolka. At that instant his father, who had been running after him, snatched him up and carried him out of the crowd. “Come along, come! Let us go home,” he said to him. “Father! Why did they … kill … the poor horse!” he sobbed, but his voice broke and the words came in shrieks from his panting chest. “They are drunk … they are brutal … it’s not our business!” said his father. He put his arms round his father but he felt choked, choked. He tried to draw a breath, to cry out—and woke up. Bretty Rawson With ten years of digital storytelling and a background in economics and psychology, Bretty Rawson edits and curates at the intersection of technology and culture; featured in The New York Times; published in (selected) The Rumpus, Narratively, Nowhere Magazine, and PANK Magazine; recipient of international Artist Residencies; Director of Programs at The Seventh Wave, a community-based digital magazine; MFA in Creative Writing, The New School.

2016: Life in Interesting Times/What Orwell Can (and Can’t) Teach Us: Jordan Rothacker in Conversation with John Reed on Fascism and the Neo-Liberal Oligarchy December 13, 2016

American writer John Reed caused a stir back in 2002 with his novel Snowball’s Chance (originally published by Roof Books, then reissued by Melville House in 2012), a parodic follow-up to George Orwell’s Animal Farm written immediately after and in response to the events of September 11, 2001. Reed’s book triggered a lawsuit from the Orwell estate and condemnation from the likes of Christopher Hitchens, but also a forward from Alexander Cockburn, high praise, and international coverage. The novel begins with the old-guard pigs dying out and before any troublesome vacuum of power can develop, lo and behold, Snowball returns—and brings with him state-supported capitalism (along with an advisor named Thomas from the intellectual class of goats). More than a parody of Orwell’s work, Snowball’s Chance is a cutting satire of American capitalism, exceptionalism, foreign policy, and interventionism. Playing by Orwell’s rules, Reed gives us our own farm fable, and while the prose might be beautiful, it’s not a pretty tableau. In light of the recent election, I reached out to John to revisit his now classic work and find out what he thinks about these, our interesting times. Rothacker: You’ve talked and written a lot about Animal Farm. One of the things you emphasize is that it is a book for a particular time (as far as Orwell was concerned) and that while that time was extended across decades of Cold War propaganda, there isn’t much context to the book now beyond the historical. Would you agree that other works by Orwell—namely 1984 and Homage to Catalonia—might be most relevant for us today?

A version of this interview was originally published in Literary Hub. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Reed, The Never End, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_10

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Reed: The argument of 1984 has been put forth in culture in very much the same way as Animal Farm: revolutions will fail. And it was put forth in the same context, i.e. the Cold War, and by the same people, i.e. the British Secret Service and the CIA. Homage to Catalonia was the first book that really drew me to Orwell: his ability to see the enemy in human terms. Rothacker: I reread Homage to Catalonia a few months ago. My first experience with fascism was in 1984; I was seven and living in Spain. Even though Franco had been dead for nine years, if you even said his name around my family in Cantabria, someone was likely to flip a table over in disgust. This led to knowledge of fascism being part of my upbringing, but many others did not have that experience—apparently, there has been a surge of Googling the term. Has Orwell helped your understanding of fascism? Reed: I have mixed feelings about Orwell and the right. His disgust with Russia was more than justified, and the threat at the end of World War II was seemingly real. Did Orwell need to cooperate quite so enthusiastically? Hand over lists and howl the party line?1 Did he understand what he was doing? Would he have been another kind of champion ten years later? Animal Farm was such a dose of poison, and yet Orwell is still a leftist icon. Do you realize that quite a few Marxists are in the upper echelons of global corporations? It’s because they understand the system. Rothacker: There are many who can rationalize pushing capitalism to the point where it naturally resolves into the next phase of history, communism. My worry is about what an upset this election was for so many pollsters and pundits who didn’t gauge the deep dissatisfaction; so many in this country have with the status quo, to the point where they are ready to turn to anyone who will make them feel heard, and they will ignore and excuse horrendous rhetoric. Reed: I’m afraid it will only get worse. Rothacker: In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell gives a middle chapter trying to explain the intricacies of the political situation of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. In it, he writes, “This meant that Franco had against him not only the working class but also various sections of the liberal bourgeoisie—the very people who are the supporters of Fascism when it appears in a more modern form.” In light of all the problems with neoliberalism, this line held some contemporary resonance for me. Of course, Franco ultimately won—with no small thanks to infighting between liberals and the left; and the left and other shades of the left—and Trump won the election. Snowball’s Chance shows a progression of state-sponsored capitalism toward a dangerous authoritarianism masked by that capitalism. What relationship do you see between fascism and capitalism? 1 Orwell’s lists are discussed throughout this collection, notably in: “The Never End”; “Animal Farm Timeline”; “George Orwell’s ‘The Freedom of the Press,’ a Proposed Preface to Animal Farm, expurgated and footnoted (with a bias)”; “Saint George and the Damn Truth”; and “The Anti-Matter of George Orwell.”.

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Reed: Well, it could be that’s a relationship that’s strengthening. I tend to see our political parties in these terms: both parties are primarily concerned with protecting rich people from their own greed, but the Democrats are a little more active about it. In short: the two parties are dedicated to the wellbeing of the rich, who should be shielded from the threats of culture and capitalism. If this were capitalism, by the way, the companies that collapsed in 2008 would no longer exist. Today, we’d see more competition, and a stronger economic base, but we would also have seen a major shift and decentralization of power, which is exactly what both parties are charged with preventing. Rothacker: In a Rumpus interview from this past June, you said that 9/11 was the end of the Cold War “because the paradigm fell apart.” Would you say a new Cold War begins at this point? Reed: Yes, we’re in the new paradigm. As much as I loathe Trump, he doesn’t like the new paradigm either. At least internationally. He’d prefer isolationism, which is not something he’ll be able to advance. This idea that we can export our power structure, and by so doing expand our economic dominance, is central to corporate strategy. I do suppose on the domestic front, Trump fits in rather precisely. When I talked to the BBC about this in 2002, I was pressed to define our current global system, and I called it Oligarchic. And then when pressed again, I’m afraid all I did was repeat myself. I think back on that instant and consider myself a stammering idiot. And I still don’t know what else to call it. I suppose it’s not quite feudal. Yet. Rothacker: That Believer magazine piece you did was a reprint (with annotations by you) of something originally written by Orwell, specifically, his essay “The Freedom of the Press,” which was a proposed preface to Animal Farm” from 1945. Did you get any flak from the Orwell estate, or had they given up on you? Reed: Ha, no problems with that. The Believer’s lawyer fretted—but that Orwell essay has been reproduced on the internet literally tens of millions of times, and there’s no clear copyright. Also, my essay is a bit of a trick. In the version published in The Believer, I elided Orwell’s original to about 1,500 words—from I seem to remember 4,500 words—and my footnotes, which were the real essay, I believe tallied at about 3,500 words. So, really, it’s just an answer to Orwell. Orwell is only quoted. Which is copyright protected. And quoted in collage. And collage is also protected.

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Rothacker: In that piece, one of your footnotes references how Orwell “struggled with the cartography of complacency.”2 You proceed to reference his essay, “Notes on Nationalism” and examine our 21st-century state of denial. What role do you see this all playing in the recent election, especially in relation to the current buzz about fake news? Reed: I think it’s worse than complacency. We’re now very proactive about living in denial. Rothacker: Are we asking for doublespeak because it confirms what we already know and thus makes us feel comfortable and validated at the same time? Reed: News was once presumed to be objective, meaning it was an objective presentation of something that actually happened. News, in current media, is now a mandate of the Fox measure “fair and balanced,” which is to say two sides of the argument will be presented with equal weight, even if one of the two sides has no basis in fact. Rothacker: Snowball’s Chance is directly a response to 9/11, and in being so, is also a response to capitalism, neoliberalism, and US foreign policy. Surprisingly, not many works of American literary fiction tackle these topics (or many that get any attention). Why do you think that is? Reed: Big presses are populated with editors and the like who are serious, political people; that said, big presses are firmly within the mega-corporate structure. The corporations who sell you books also sell oil, and weapons, and whatever particular Homo sapiens nightmare you care to summon. Is there a systematic censorship of more political works? I personally am inclined to doubt it. Is there, within the culture of a big corporation, a corporate acculturation? Of course. And the media and distribution models that sell books are no less acculturated. Are there books that slip through the cracks? Yes. Do literary authors have specific areas in which they’re more political or acute? Yes. Most of us, in our daily lives, are by necessity political hypocrites; we simply cannot afford our own idealism—and our own compassion. Rothacker: Specifically dealing with the George W. Bush presidency, what significant literary or other artistic reactions have you found solace in? There 2

The footnote reads: “That people were willing to live in a state of denial—ignoring war, ignoring injustice, ignoring tremendous threats to themselves and even the planet—continually amazed Orwell, and he struggled with the cartography of complacency. In a letter to a friend, he wrote, ‘In the face of terrifying dangers and golden political opportunities, people just keep on keeping on, in a sort of twilight sleep in which they are conscious of nothing except the daily round of work, family life, darts at the pub, exercising the dog, mowing the lawn, bringing home the beer, etc.’ In ‘Notes on Nationalism,’ Orwell marveled at ‘the lunatic habit of identifying oneself with large power units.’ And therein lies the answer to our twenty-first century state of denial. Our identities are under siege: advertising, education, the arts. We are built up and destroyed by lifestyles and categories (of race, of class, of culture) that exist primarily to contain, delimit, divide and exploit the human experience. If there’s anything you think you need to buy to be who you are— whether it’s curtains from Ikea or a CD or a book or liposuction or take-your-pick—you don’t own yourself.”

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was such an artistic response to the Nixon presidency and the Vietnam War, but has there been anything comparable to the Bush years? Reed: I would love to see a foam puppet of George Bush. Well, a better one. A perfect Muppet version. I’d also love to own one of his paintings. Either a dog painting or a veteran portrait. Mister President, I would be much obliged, and would be happy to trade a catalog essay for a small work. Rothacker: I’m also intrigued by his paintings. Do you find his art to be a response to his presidency? What I find most intriguing about the paintings is how little they seem to say. Reed: I’ve always thought that GWB would one day wake up and say, “What have I done?” There’s no reason for me to think that, I suppose, but I do. Rothacker: One of the problems several critics have had with Animal Farm, yourself included, is that focusing so exclusively on an anti-Stalinist agenda creates a pessimistic view of revolutions in general. I believe Orwell himself lamented this. Looking at our current situation, what kind of revolution do you think Orwell would still see as possible and most practical? Reed: You’re right about Orwell’s dissatisfaction with that read of Animal Farm, but he was complicit in putting it forward. The work was massively translated and distributed by the British Foreign Office, which was working in tandem with the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the CIA in promoting a Western outlook. I think that Orwell believed he could ultimately undo that presentation of Animal Farm, as well as a similar interpretation of 1984. But unfortunately, he made that bed then died in it. My completely subjective guess on where Orwell would have turned his attention next: the environmental movement, especially as it took shape in the 1960s and 70s. Rothacker: I had wanted to ask you if you were an Orwell scholar before writing Snowball’s Chance, but in researching I found that much of your Orwell knowledge came after the book was released. It is funny that a book you churned out in a three-week burst of impassioned creativity has led to you now being a go-to guy on Orwell (hence me and our discussion). Is this as amusing to you? Reed: It is indeed. But also fitting, I think. You know, in public school, I read Animal Farm over and over again—it was presented to me in the context of the Cold War; in fact, I would read the book and be shown the CIA animation for explanation—and it’s to be expected that a child would then try to use the propaganda against the propagandists. Rothacker: I just want to get something straight: Hitchens debated you on the BBC (with you over the phone) and called you a “Bin Ladenist” because of your book, and then mentioned in passing that he hadn’t read it? Reed: Yes, that’s right. He did read it later, and in his defense, the book had just come out. I was shocked, however, by how many people reviewed and discussed that book without reading it. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive The Boston Globe for publishing Cathy Young’s appraisal, which concluded that I was blaming the victim of terrorism, and casually disclosed that reading the

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book was not a part of her reviewing process. That ilk of reviewing has become much more common now, of course, but it belongs in the internet’s jetstream of garbage, not in the columns of a major newspaper. Rothacker: There is a really stupid English expression, often seen as a curse, “may you live in interesting times” that I’ve always taken to mean “may you finally pay attention,” since of course, what times aren’t interesting? Can you generalize about our interesting times? Reed: I do have a sense that we’re reaching some kind of breaking point that is totally outside of the technological advancement we associate with the future. The anger that so many people feel is general, but also a direct result of an economic system that no longer bothers to project paternalism. The stuff you pay for doesn’t work, and your time is of no value. The level of daily thievery, whether from the financial sector or the marketplace, is far higher than I’ve experienced thus far in my lifetime. The problem is due in part to the lack of accountability; internet entities are often beyond regulation. But that lack of accountability is also what makes individual anger so imminent, and so applicable. Rothacker: Which brings to mind one of the most important things Orwell illustrates in Homage to Catalonia, the messiness of the left. One of the most important things, still today, that Orwell reminds us is that the right—conservatism, authoritarianism, fascism—is simple, it’s easy (for the “in group,” of course). But progress—moving a people, a society into better ways of life—is where the real political work and challenges are, and therefore it is difficult and unstable. But it’s worth it. We hope. Reed: Yes, “the animals never gave up hope.”3 Jordan Rothacker With a background in journalism, Jordan Rothacker completed a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature with a dissertation “On Cultural Guerilla Warfare: The Artist as Activist” at the University of Georgia, where he now teaches in the English Department; author of five books, most recently The Death of the Cyborg Oracle; published in (selected) Cagibi, The Heavy Feather Review, Flagpole, The Brooklyn Rail, The Believer, Cleaver Magazine, Guernica, The Broad Collective, The Athens Banner-Herald, Curbside Splendor, As It Ought to Be, and Literary Hub.

3

Quoted from Animal Farm.

1879, 1917, 2015: “Animal Riot: Letter from a Little Russian Landowner to His Friend in St. Petersburg” By Nikolai Kostomarov, Translated by Tanya Paperny

The most unusual thing happened over here, so unusual that had I heard it from someone or read it somewhere and not seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. Completely incredible: riot, uprising, revolution! You probably think this was some sort of defiance of masters by their subordinates. Precisely. But this was not a riot of subordinates exactly but of the indentured, and not of humans but of farm animals and house pets. We are used to thinking that since animals are mute, they must also be foolish. It seems rational using human logic: they can’t talk, we say among ourselves, so they must not think or understand anything! But is this actually true? We can’t reason with them, so we consider them foolish and mute, but it turns out—as we’ll thoroughly discuss here—that we can’t understand their language. After all, learned ones have shown that the Russian word for German, nemetz, comes from the word mute, nemoi, and that this nickname was given to the Teutonic tribes by Slavs because Slavs didn’t understand their language. The exact same thing happened here. Recently, science has begun to understand that animals—whom we flippantly think of as mute and foolish—have a way of communicating emotions using their own language, which sounds nothing like ours, the human language. There’s already been much written about this, but since we live on a homestead out in the backcountry, we don’t read such articles and

Drafted by the author circa 1879, first known publication in 1917 (Niva), translated (by Tanya Paperny) and published in English in 2015 (selected text, Harper’s Magazine), published in English in full in 2016 (the full Paperny translation, PANK Magazine, January 9). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Reed, The Never End, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_11

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only hear they exist somewhere in Europe. However, one can find such wise men in these parts, ones who are even more knowledgeable than the learned Europeans about the ways animals express their thoughts. On our homestead, we have one wise man like this. His name is Omelko. An unbelievable person, I tell you! He has never read any books or studied grammar, but he knows in entirety the language and dialects of all domesticated animals: cattle, horses, sheep, and pigs—even chickens and geese! And how did he learn all this when no one here has a grammar book or dictionary of animal languages, you might ask? Omelko achieved all this by virtue of his uncommon abilities, without any guidance, armed with nothing but a constant and stubborn observation of animal customs and ways. Omelko has lorded over our animals since his childhood, for more than forty years now. There are others like him in Little Russia, but no one can match even a fourth of his knowledge. He has so completely mastered the language of animals that if a cow merely grunts, a sheep bleats, or a pig oinks, Omelko can tell you right away what this animal wants to say. This one-of-akind expert on animal nature would never agree with those who believe that the logical faculties animals possess are much weaker than those of humans. Omelko insists that animals display an intelligence no lesser—and sometimes even greater—than that of humans. Omelko has commented on this again and again: “You go out at night, you don’t know the road well and you get lost. You look and look, but you can’t find the way. So you let your horse lead, and he knows the road better than you and takes you where you need to get to.” And with cattle, it’s like this: the boys take them out to pasture and then play around or fall asleep and lose the cattle. Later the boys are crying, poor things, but the cattle—they find their way back without the herders. One time the sexton, having returned from our parish about five miles away, started telling us the biblical story of Balaam and his female donkey, which he called a mare so we’d understand. Hearing the story, Omelko said: “That’s nothing strange. It just means Balaam understood equine language. Entirely possible. A mare could have said the same thing to me.” Omelko told us much, so much, from his many years communicating with animals of different breeds, which explains the strange event we’ll now describe. As far back as the fall of 1879, different animals on my estate started showing signs of resistance and disobedience, and a revolutionary spirit was born, directed against the rule of man, a power which has been anointed by the centuries and legends. According to Omelko, the first signs of this movement appeared in the bulls, who since time immemorial have stood out for their willfulness—which is why humans have often relied on strict and sometimes even severe methods to restrain them. On our homestead we had one bull like this. Afraid to let him into the field with the rest of the herd, they instead held him in a locked pen. When they led him to drink, they put chains on his legs and a wooden visor over his eyes to prevent him from seeing anything on the path ahead.

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Otherwise, he’d become so violent that he’d throw himself at every person he’d encounter and rear his horns for no good reason. A few times I thought about killing him, but every time his life was saved by Omelko, who insisted this bull possessed such great characteristics inherent in his bullish genes that he wouldn’t be easily replaced. At Omelko’s insistence I decided to let him live, but only with the understanding that the strictest precautions be taken so this ruffian not do anyone irreparable harm. Sometimes when they’d shepherd him and the village boys could hear his terrible bellowing from afar, they’d run off in different directions so as not to find themselves face-to-face with the raging animal. We all thought it was just his beastly energy and the anguish of unending bondage that made him so violent, but Omelko—guided by his knowledge of animal dialects—noted that the bellows of our bull resembled something more serious: agitation toward mutiny and insubordination. Bulls, as Omelko realized, can have qualities like we encounter in some of our brother humans: they have a sort of constant, untamable desire to agitate without clear purpose—strife for strife’s sake, revolt for revolt’s sake, and a fight for fight’s sake. Calm bores them and order nauseates them—they want everything around them to be seething, everything to make a racket—and on top of that, they delight in knowing that they and no one else orchestrated it all. Like we said, you can find these kinds of beings among humans—they also exist among animals. That’s how our bull was, and so the horrible uprising—which we’re talking about now—started with him, that all-animal agitator. Always standing in his pen in a sad loneliness, our bull bellowed nonstop day and night, and Omelko—the legendary expert on bovine language—heard him cursing all of humankind, using curse words even Shakespeare couldn’t have dreamed up for Timon of Athens. When the bulls and cows would come inside the pen in the evening after grazing, the bull would carry on evening conversations with his horned brethren, sowing the first seeds of criminal dissent among his class of comrades. For his many years of service, Omelko had been promoted to oversee the whole animal domain, and under his supervision were not only bulls and cows but also sheep, goats, horses, and pigs. You can imagine how at his managerial level, with his many and varied responsibilities, it was impossible to keep a regular and close watch on these scandalous conversations, so taking immediate preventative measures was the responsibility of less senior persons. But because of his deep familiarity with animal languages and customs, it was enough that Omelko had walked into the cattle pen two or three times. When the rebellion exploded, he could immediately point to its origins from his few observations. Unfortunately, I will add, Omelko had an extremely gentle and mild disciplinary style, so he approached with leniency that which, as the consequences showed, should have been dealt with using the harshest methods to nip the evil in the bud. More than once, upon walking into the

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pen unexpectedly for a short while, he’d overheard the scandalous antics of the bull, but Omelko dismissed them as the delusions of youth and inexperience. The speeches the bulls heard at these protests translate roughly into human language as follows: Brother bulls, sister and wife cows! Honorable animals, worthy of a better lot than the one you bear at the will of some unknown fate, one which enslaves you to the tyrant human! For a long time—so long that our animal memory cannot even estimate—you have drank from the trough of calamity and can never seem to get to the bottom. Using the superiority of his mind over ours, the treacherous tyrant subjugates us, we of feeble minds, so much that we have lost the dignity of living beings and have become like unthinking tools to satisfy his whims. The humans milk our mothers and wives, depriving our little baby calves, and what don’t they make from our cow’s milk! After all this milk is our property and not theirs! Instead of our cows, let them milk their own women. But no, apparently they don’t like their own milk so much—ours is tastier! And that’s not all. We bulls are a kind-hearted people: we would have allowed ourselves to be milked as long as they didn’t do anything worse. But again, look at what they do to our poor calves. They load the poor little things in a cart, tie their legs, and take them away! And where do they carry them? To have their throats cut, torn from their mother’s teat! The greedy tyrant has taken a liking to their meat, and how! He considers it one of his best dishes! And what does the tyrant do to our adult brethren? Over there, our brother the noble ox is carrying a heavy yoke on his neck to drag a plow and dig holes for the tyrant. Our tyrant throws seeds into the ground dug up by the ox’s labor, and from that grain grows grass, and from that grass our tyrant knows how to make this clod, just like earth only whiter, and our tyrant calls this bread and devours it because it is very tasty. And suppose our horned brother dares to walk out onto the field—plowed previously by his own labor—to enjoy tasty grasses. Our brother will be chased out with a whip or even a club. But in fact, the grass growing on that field is our property and not man’s. After all it was our brother who dragged the plow and tilled the earth. Without that this grass would not have grown on the field by itself. He who labors should get to reap the benefits of that labor. So it should follow: you yoked us to the plow and used our labor to dig up the field, so give us the grass sown on that field. And if man needs to take some grain, which he tossed into the land dug up by our labor, for himself, then he should at least give us half and take the other half for himself. But he greedily takes it all, and what is left for us is nothing but a beating. Our animal brothers are such kindhearted people that they would tolerate even this. But the cruelty of our tyrant toward us grown bulls does not end there! Has it ever happened to you, brother, that you are grazing in the field and see them driving a herd of our brother cattle, or even sheep, along the posted road? The herd is so plump, happy and playful! You might think the tyrant has taken pity and repented for his misdeeds against our breed. He fattened us up and set us free. Not a chance! The stupid bull is playing and thinks he has just

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been set free to the wide-open steppe. But he will soon find out what kind of freedom awaits him! Yes, the tyrant fed him alright: all summer our brother beast walked the fields in complete happiness, and they didn’t torment him with work, but why? Why did the tyrant become so merciful toward his animals? Here is why: ask where they are taking this bull now, and you will learn that the enemy master sold his bull to another evil member of the human race who will then take the bull to a huge human pen, which they call a city. As soon as they get there, they will drag the poor animal to a slaughterhouse, and there the old bull will suffer the same fate as the young calves, only more torturous. Do you know, brother, about this slaughterhouse where they are taken? You will feel a chill creep through your veins as soon as you realize what they do at that slaughterhouse, so it is for good reason that our brother beast lows pitifully when nearing the city where it is located. They tie the poor bull to a post, and then the evildoer approaches with a hatchet and hits him square on the head between the horns. The bull howls from fear and pain, stands on his hind legs and the evildoer gives it to him one more time—then a knife to the throat. One after the first, then a third, then a dozen and another dozen, until he’s gotten a hundred bulls. Bovine blood spills in torrents. Then they take the skin off the dead ones, cut the meat into chunks and sell it in their markets. The other bulls that were brought to the city to be killed walk past those stands and see the meat of their comrades hanging there, and their bovine hearts sense that soon the same fate will befall them! From our skin, the tyrant makes shoes to protect his cursed feet, and from that very skin he makes different types of bags to pack his things. These he tosses into a cart, and to this very cart he’ll tie up our brother. And from that same skin he cuts out narrow strips to make whips, and he strikes us with those same whips made of our skin. Sometimes they even beat one another with these whips made from our skin! Heartless tyrants! Not only do they behave this way toward us: they manage no better between themselves! They enslave one another, they torment and torture one another … what a mean breed these humans! There is no one meaner on earth. Meaner than all the animals! And somehow this fierce, bloodthirsty creature ensnared us innocent animals into hard, unbearable bondage. Now, considering all this, is our fate not sour? But are we actually stuck here? Are we actually so weak that we can never free ourselves from this slavery? Do we not have horns? Were there not times when in a fit of righteous indignation our horned brothers ripped open the stomachs of our oppressors? When our horned brother kicks a human, does he not immediately break the human’s leg or arm? What are we, weak? After all, our enemy harnesses our horned brother precisely when he needs to carry a heavy load, one a human can’t lift himself. Hence our tyrant knows well that we have much strength, more strength than he. Our oppressor only dares when he does not expect any resistance from us; when he sees that we will not submit to him, he calls over other brother men who run to join in the treachery. Some days the cattle herd does not want to obey the herder—he is herding to the right but the bulls want to go left—so the herder will call on other herdsmen to surround us, one from one side, another from the other side, and the third will get up in front to scare

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one of our brothers. This way they can lead the whole herd where they want to. For their feeble-mindedness, ours do not realize that even though they are surrounded on all sides by herders, those cattlemen are still smaller than our brothers. They should not obey but point their horns at the herder, who would then go away because they would not be able to manage our herd. But ours do not realize what to do and are obedient—they walk where they are led and just sigh, for there is much to sigh about. Our brothers would love to eat some tasty field grasses and play around a bit the way they like to—butt each other with their horns for fun, scratch up on the tree. But they do not let us over there and instead lead us to a pasture where other than some short knotweeds, there is nothing to nibble on, or they chase us into a lonely pen to chew on straw. All this because we are obedient and afraid to show our animal dignity. Let us stop obeying the tyrant: let us announce our intentions not just with our bellowing but with simultaneous jumping and headbutting; let us show that we want to be free animals by any means necessary and not his cowardly slaves. Oh, brother bulls and sister cows! We have long been young and naïve! But a different period has come—new times are upon us! We have now matured enough, wizened up, evolved! It’s time to throw off the miserable chains of slavery and avenge our ancestors, those tortured by work, emaciated by hunger and bad feed, stuck under whip cracks and heavy carts, killed in slaughterhouses and ripped into chunks by our torturers. Let us rise up together, united under one horn! And we cattle are not alone as we rise up against humans: for one, the horses are striking with us, and the goats, sheep and pigs—all domestic creatures whom the human has enslaved will rise up for freedom from our shared tyrant. We will cease all our internal fighting, all petty disagreements between individuals, and at every moment we will remember that we share a common enemy and oppressor. We will achieve equality, liberty and independence; restore the overthrown and trampled dignity of all living animals; and bring back those happy times when animals were still free and not trapped under the cruel reign of humans. Let us go back to those blissful old times: all the fields, meadows, pastures, groves and wheat fields will be ours, and we will have the right to graze, buck and playfully butt our heads wherever we want. We will start living in total freedom and absolute happiness. Long live bestiality! Down with mankind!

The bull’s outrageous speech achieved the desired effect. Afterward, for the whole summer, cattle spread revolutionary ideas throughout the pens, pastures, and paddocks, and they started underground meetings where all they talked about was how and with what actions they should launch their revolt against man. Many were of the belief that acting alone was easiest, ramming one’s horns at one or the other of the cattlemen until all were eradicated; others who were a bit more courageous proposed it was better to right away get rid of the one giving orders to all the cattlemen: first slaughter the master himself. But those oxen who used to go on Chumak trading trips and had expanded their worldview offered the following idea:

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What good will it do if we kill the lead tyrant? He will not be in power anymore, but then another will just take his place. If we are taking on the grand project of liberating the animal kingdom, then it needs to be done firmly to carry out a fundamental transformation of animal society, and we need to use our animal minds to develop foundations on which to forever establish our well-being. And can we as cattle organize this for everyone else? No! No! This is not exclusively our project, but one for all the different animal species enslaved to man! Horses and goats, sheep and pigs, and perhaps even caged birds all need to rise up against our common enemy, and when we throw off our wretched bondage, we will have a general gathering of all beasts to establish a new liberated union.

This bullish insubordination spilled over to the horses, whose herd grazed on the same field as the cattle. The spirit of mutiny then fully penetrated their neighing society. According to Omelko’s observations, equine language differs completely from bovine, but cohabitation has led to some points of closeness between the two breeds. It’s become common among the horses to understand bovine language and vice versa. The word among the bovine breed meaning “bull,” among the equine breed means “stallion” in all cases. The stallions were a rowdy bunch, by nature inclined toward all kinds of defiance, predestined for the role of agitator, you could say. On my estate, there was a chestnut stallion in the equine herd, a big bully. When they were shepherding him and would tie him up, it would take two herders without fail to hold him back by the reins. They once tried to harness him to the shaft and drive him and the carriage down the road, but he immediately and willfully swerved to the side, reared his front legs into the first hut he came across, and neighed loudly. Another time I had guests, and I ordered him to be brought over to be shown off with other beautiful horses. He bit two of my geldings for no good reason and kicked a third one with his hooves. When the geldings struck back, it became such a mess that I ordered them immediately separated and taken away. What a prankster! Regardless of his childish games, he was held in high esteem among the horses, and they were all ready to heed whatever he said. In equine mores, combativeness is not considered a vice; on the contrary, it earns one respect and attention, just as it once did among the Vikings. This chestnut agitator started rallying the horses against human domination: “We have suffered enough under the human tyrant! The two-legged villain has enslaved us, forever free four-legged creatures, and keeps our offspring in the most terrible bondage. What will he not do to us? How he abuses us! He saddles us up, rides on our backs and tricks us into bloody battle with his enemies! Did you know that the humans call this cavalry? The cavalry horses have told horrors about what happens to our brothers. The hairs on your mane stand up straight when you hear these stories. They mount our brother and rush at one another. They want to kill each other, and they kill us in the process. Their ruthless, severe hearts do not pity

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us. So much noble equine blood is shed. Then such horrible sights! A poor horse, having lost one leg, hops behind the others on three legs, spilling blood until he falls unconscious. Another, having lost two legs at once, crawls around in vain trying to stand up on the remaining two. A third, pierced through the chest, lays on the ground and wishes he were dead. A fourth—his eyes poked out. A fifth—his head chopped off. Piles of horse and human carcasses! And for what? Do we, poor things, even know why they are fighting amongst themselves? That is their business, not ours. If they do not get along, fine, then they can fight and squabble amongst themselves and slaughter each other. After all, when we get into fights, we squabble and bite and kick, but we do not call them over and entangle them in our fights! Then why do they drag us into a violent death when they fight between themselves? They don’t ask the cavalry horses if they want to fight a war, but they saddle and ride them to fight; they never consider that maybe our brother has no interest in dying without knowing what he is dying for. And even without a war, you would not believe how man oppresses us and how he curses at us! He loads up his cart or wagon with all kinds of heavy things, saddles up our brother, and makes him tug; urging him on, he unmercifully beats the horse with a whip on his back, his head, wherever it lands, without the slightest mercy, until he beats him to death. Sometimes a horse will draw his last breath while others get injured from the excessive burden—they break their legs and the heartless tyrant will leave them to die and go saddle some other horses to the same torment. Oh brothers! Man is cruel but sly too: do not be deceived by his cunning. Man pretends to love us, praises us in front of other people. Do not believe him. Do not be seduced by his seeming concern for the propagation of our breed, that he collects a herd of mares and lets the stallions in. He does this for his own good and not for us: he wants our breed to procreate and bear him slaves. Some of us he leaves alone to create progeny, but others—and in much larger number—he savagely mutilates, denies the ability to bear offspring and condemns to perpetual involuntary labor and all kinds of torment. The despot perverts our noble breed and wants us to have the same social hierarchies that humans have, where some luxuriate and others suffer. Some of our brothers, satiated with oats and hay, are not tormented with work; if they get saddled or harnessed, then only for a short time, and then they are spared and sent to rest. They stand in their stables and eat plenty of oats, and as soon as they get let out to graze, they play, jump and enjoy themselves. Some do not get left in the stalls all—instead they walk in total freedom through expansive fields with their mares, while others, always half starving, exhausted from the incessant chase and from heavy loads, get no reward for their hard work other than blows from a whip! Brothers! Have you no hooves and teeth? Can you not bellow and bite? Or did you become weak? But look how often our tyrant pays miserably for his arrogance when he attacks a proud horse who, in a burst of memory about his equine nobility, breaks out so that even four villains cannot contain him; and if the arrogant and defiant despot dares mount him, this horse will throw him off and sometimes even stomp on him a bit, enough that the bastard lays injured for several days!

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The despot considers us so dumb and slavishly obedient that he is not afraid to give our brothers weapons we could use against him. Did he not hammer nails into our hooves! Horseshoed horses! Turn the weapons he gave you back on him: smite him with your horseshoes! And you, unshoed ones, show him that even without horseshoes your hooves are so strong and heavy that with them you can demonstrate your superiority over man! With or without horseshoes, let us unite our hooves and rise up in brotherhood against our fierce enemy. Besides hooves, let us consider our teeth. With those you can inflict no less harm upon our subjugator! Let us fight for our freedom! Future equine generations will honor you for many centuries. And not just the equine race but other animals will honor you: we will all join at once! All of the grains left on the stalks and all the grasses will be ours. No one will dare chase us out of there like they used to. Never again will they harness us, saddle us or urge us on with whips. Freedom! Freedom! To battle, brothers! Collective freedom for all animals, for the honor of the equine race.”

After this speech, there was riotous neighing, mutinous shrieking, thunderous stomping, the throwing of legs in the air, and other standard sounds that accompany equine bravado, “Get the human! Get the human! Get the fierce tyrant! Kick him! Beat him! Bite him!”. These exclamations were overheard by members of the cattle herd who could understand equine speech. The cattle delighted in hearing that the uprising, which first took hold in their midst, had spilled over to the equine race. Oxen and cows boldly butted horns and let out a militant bellow. Then, the horned and the hoofed moved in two militias toward the manor. To the right of the herd, separated by a ravine from where the horses grazed, goats and sheep roamed on a hill. Seeing the turmoil in the cattle and horse herds, they got agitated, and the whole flock began storming over to the cows and horses. They had to either walk around or jump across a ravine, which wasn’t wide. The goats considered themselves, by their very nature, the most fit to walk at the head of the herd: baaing, they darted toward the ravine and hopped over it with their caprine liveliness, proudly raising their chins and shaking out their beards, as if waiting for approval of their bravado. The goats behind them jumped across the ravine just as easily. But the sheep were not so nimble. Granted, some who followed closely behind the goats found themselves on the other side of the ravine, but many fell in, crawling along the bottom, scrambling over one another as they bleated pathetically. This didn’t stop the rear from following their lead. The sheep ran in the direction indicated by those in the front and also found themselves at the bottom of the ravine. The ones that did cross to the other side didn’t know what to do, so they crowded together and let out a sort of pathetic democratic bleat. The rams shuffled from side to side, bumping into one another’s heads. The pigs, moving along the opposite side of the road which led from the field to the village, saw the turmoil between the different breeds of animals. They were immediately seized by the revolutionary spirit, which had likely penetrated swine society earlier. The hogs, tearing at the ground with their tusks, ran

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up ahead and turned onto the road which led straight to the master’s manor, and behind the hogs, the whole oinking drove ran along that very same road, raising such dust that you couldn’t even see the sun through it all. Seeing the alarm among the animals, Omelko rushed to the road where the pigs were running and thought he’d start subduing the rebels with them. Having learned oinking language, Omelko overheard the hogs urging fellow pigs to keep up with the other beasts rising up against the intolerable rule of man. Omelko could hear them angrily recalling charred hogs at Christmastime, bristles torn out of the backs of live pigs, and piglets slaughtered throughout the year. A fat pig grunted about the humiliation that humans brought upon the swine race when they called anyone they found disgusting a “pig.” Another pig, running alongside the first, responded: “That’s nothing. What is worse is that while despising pigs and criticizing our characteristics, man still cuts us up for lard and makes ham and sausage from our pig meat. Our fat and meat suit his tastes. He considers a live pig to be far worse than most creatures, but a chopped-up pig is repaid with more honor than others, as if to degrade our piggish race.” Running down the road to the master’s estate and oinking, the pigs stirred up hatred for man in one another. “Where should we start?” they asked each other when they’d neared the estate. “Our job is to dig up dirt,” others answered. “We’ll invade the master’s garden; there he has a vegetable patch. We’ll dig up all the rows. Then we’ll break into his flower bed, which he planted right near the balcony for his own pleasure. There we’ll turn everything upside down, like pigs! Don’t let those humans forget what pigs did to his garden and to his flower bed!” Omelko ran alongside the pigs for a few minutes believing he could hold back their raid, but then he decisively abandoned those plans after one of the hogs threatened to stab him with his tusks. Omelko veered off the road and headed straight for the estate, cutting across the field. As soon as Omelko arrived at the homestead bringing news of the universal animal uprising, my two sons and I headed over to the tower on our property and looked through the telescope. The rioting animals flocking toward the estate looked to me like a cloud at first, but then the hordes became more distinct. Through the telescope, I could see the running horses occasionally kicking up their hooves and the bulls bulging out their horns. Both were apparently taking pleasure in imagining how they would soon kick and head butt us. Both were already getting close to the estate. The sheep and goats stood by the ravine bleating and baaing as if wondering what to do. After running down from the tower back to the house, I peeked through the window on my way out to the garden and saw that the pigs had already invaded, getting in through the spot where a wooden fence around the garden had fallen apart and never been fixed. Some were furiously laying waste to the rows of potatoes,

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radishes, carrots, and other vegetables and greedily eating up the roots, while others, who had gotten ahead of the rest, had already raided the flower bed along the same wall of the manor where I was looking through the window. I watched as the insolent pigs dug up roses, lilies, and peonies with their snouts. I ran into the room where I kept the guns and took three shotguns—one for me and one for each of my sons. On top of that, I handed a shotgun to each of my servants and walked out onto the porch facing the gates of the garden. I ordered the fence and the garden gate, which led to the courtyard from the outside, to be locked. Our weakest front was in the garden, which the pigs had already gotten into, and it seemed dangerously likely that other animals would flock there, but we were reassured by one last hope that even if they managed to take over the garden, we still controlled the courtyard, which was impossible to reach from the garden other than to approach via the ruins of the mansion, which separated the garden from the courtyard. When walking into the house for the guns, I also ordered one of my servants to ride on horseback over to town, the one ten miles from ours, to ask the police chief to authorize the dispatch of military forces to quell the rebellion. But this attempt didn’t work out. As soon as my messenger mounted the cavalry and got to the other side of the fence, the horse threw off the rider and ran to join the mutiny. I had many dogs—I sometimes went hunting. The dogs, as expected given the reputation of their breed, didn’t have the slightest intention of joining the rebellion. So we counted on them. We had to split them into two squads: we sent one to the garden to see if they could push out the pigs and positioned the other in front of the gates to beat back the rush of animals if they started to overtake that entrance. The wall around the yard was made of brick but not tall. The horses, rearing onto their hind legs, were already hooking their front ones onto the edge of the wall and making mean faces at us, but they couldn’t jump over it. Then, a servant ran up to me on the porch with more threatening news: a riot had exploded in the bird house. First, the geese rose up. Who knows how the rebellious spirit—having already gripped four-legged domestic animals— penetrated their coop. Only the geese, who with their snake-like hisses threatened to carry out an evil plan to bite the birder. The latter had barely managed to step toward the gates of the birdhouse when she heard the liberal honking of the ducks, who were also waddling from side to side with the most impudent look as if to say, “we have no use for humans anymore!” Behind them, turkeys arrogantly spread their tails and huddled together, letting out the most horrible screams, as if they wanted to scare someone. A big fiery colored rooster gave the rousing signal with his loud voice, and then roosters crowed, hens clucked, and the whole society of chickens began taking flight, either landing on a beam or flying off onto the ground. Peering into the chicken shed, Omelko could tell that the chickens had lent their wings to the uprising and were threatening to peck at humans out of

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revenge for all the chickens and chicks slaughtered by cooks and all the eggs taken away from hens. After hearing this news, we waited on the porch for a bit. I pointed out that where we stood was dangerously low and that we needed to choose a different, more elevated position. Looking around our courtyard, I realized that the highest point in the whole place was the wooden tower, which served as a dovecot, so we stepped off the porch and headed there. We decided to climb up to the top and wait there until the rioting animals could get us out and tear us to shreds or until some unforeseen circumstance could deliver us from death. But then we were met with something unexpected: four cats sitting together on the ground. Two of them lived in the estate, and the third—fat as can be with a white coat and big black spots on his back and belly—was a favorite of the female servants and a big mouse eater who’d acquired great fame around the courtyard for his victories over huge rats. That cat, always sweet and friendly, always purring and rubbing up against humans, was now out of nowhere sitting in the middle of the courtyard with the other cats and giving us such dirty looks like he was readying to jump and claw at our faces. Dogs never seemed like they’d switch sides, but we’ve long expected this from the feline race. So it appeared this house cat of ours, in a critical moment for our safety from the enemies, was going to play the role Mazepa once played for Peter the Great. We stopped unwillingly, seeing the feline group ahead, but then my youngest son—without thinking long—whistled for the dogs, directing them at the cats and yelling, “get ‘em!” The dogs launched at the cats, who got frightened and ran off in different directions. I watched as the fat, motley cat climbed up a post on the porch and, while grabbing on with his claws, looked back with menacing eyes at the dogs, wishing he could get them and making the kind of noise a cat makes in moments of anger and frustration. We reached the dovecot and started to climb up the narrow stairs, when all of a sudden, doves started flying at us, as if aiming to hit us with their wings and peck at us with their beaks. We started waving them aside, sensing that the birds who we had gotten used to as meek and sweet were now overtaken by the rebellious spirit which had gripped all four- and two-legged animals under the rule of humans. We guessed that they now remembered those bitter moments when the cook showed up at their dovecot with his slaughtering knife to find a good stew bird. You over in the Great Russian provinces don’t eat squab, so if your domesticated animals rioted, then you’d be insured against any threat from the doves. However, in that moment, the hostility toward us humans did not last long. My youngest son fired his shotgun, and the birds flew off. Unimpeded, we assumed the highest point in the dovecot and from there looked down on the huge horde of cattle and horses overtaking the garden. It was impossible to talk or hear one another over all the howling, shrieking, and neighing.

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After running out of the dovecot, Omelko paced about the courtyard like a madman, and it was clear that like us, he didn’t know what to do. I called him over to the bird house and said: “You alone know animal languages and can communicate with them. Of course I won’t force you into the yard because the minute you stick out your head, some bull will ram into you or some mare will bite you, and then they’ll tear through the fence and we’ll all be done with. But what about this: can you climb onto the wall and negotiate with the rioters from there? Try it!”. Omelko sent off to fulfill my request. We watched his movements with rapt attention and saw that after putting up a ladder, he climbed onto the wall, but we couldn’t hear what language he was using to speak to the rebels. We couldn’t tell whether he mooed or neighed, but we heard the most horrible noise from the other side of the fence and saw Omelko jump off and walk back toward us while waving his arms, like one does to show that the plan isn’t working. “Master, there’s nothing we can do with the bandits!” he said, coming back to the dovecot. “I tried to admonish them; I told them that God himself made them to serve man and man to be their master. But they all shouted, ‘Who is this god? That is your human thing, this god business. We animals do not know any god. We will ram you with our horns, tyrants and evildoers,’ shouted the cattle. ‘Stomp on you with our hooves,’ said the horses. ‘Chew you out with our teeth,’ shouted others in unison.” “So what do we do now, Omelko?” I asked with indescribable alarm. “There’s only one option left,” said Omelko. “Tell them we’re letting them all go: the bulls, the cows and the horses! ‘Go out to the field, graze like you know how; you can eat everything planted on the hills. We won’t enslave you with any more work, so go!’ Overjoyed, they’ll spread out into the fields. Then we’ll deal somehow with the sheep, pigs and birds. We just need get rid of the horned and hoofed ones: they’re the only danger because they’re strong! They’ll go to the field and amuse themselves for a while, but then they’ll start to fight amongst themselves and tear at each other—let them trample the fields since most of the wheat is already cleared away. Yes, we’ll lose what’s left, but at least we’ll remain alive and intact! It’s too bad about the hay in the haystack. Those bandits will devour everything! But then the animals won’t know what to do with themselves, and we can find a way to get them under our power again. The longest their freedom could even last is until the first frost, and when there’s nothing left growing in the fields, they’ll come back to us on their own! Autumn isn’t that far off, after all!”

I permitted Omelko to do as he proposed. He climbed up onto the wall again, and even more attentively than before, we watched his every move. After a few minutes, the whole horde of animals besieging the yard ran headfirst to the field, howling and neighing. We could see the horses and cows jumping out of apparent joy.

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Omelko climbed down, came back to us and said: “Got rid of them, thank God! Managed to let out only the horses and cattle. Send the dogs out into the yard with the pigs, let the birder pacify the birds and I’ll go take care of the goats and sheep.” “How did you get rid of the horned and the hoofed?” I asked Omelko. “Oh, like this,” he explained. “‘What do you need,’ I asked them, ‘tell us now. Maybe we’ll give you what you want.’ ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ the horned and hoofed shouted in unison. And so I told them, ‘Well fine then, go be free! Step out into the field, take all the wheat that’s left on the stalk. We won’t work you any longer. You’ll be free!’ As soon as they heard me, they immediately stomped, bucked and shouted, ‘We are free! We are free! We got our freedom! Freedom—ours for the taking! Freedom! Freedom!’ And they ran off.” “Good work Omelko,” I said to him, “you deserve much honor and praise! You saved us all from disaster.” We climbed down from the dovecot. I ordered all the remaining dogs to be gathered up, and led through the house into the garden to join the dogs sent there earlier to deal with the pigs. Up until then, their job couldn’t have been going very well since the number of dogs sent out to the garden was small compared to the number who arrived to help them from the courtyard. When those dogs were brought out, I walked into the house and up to the window, pointing a loaded rifle out of the open pane. I aimed at the hog, who was working on a lilac bush in the flower bed, trying to pull it up by the roots. The bullet went straight through the predator. Frightened by the shots and defeated by their bold canine enemy, the pigs abandoned the flower bed and ran to their comrades who were working on the vegetable garden on the other end of the yard. The dogs had them cornered: some sunk their teeth into the pigs’ legs, while others ran ahead and grabbed them by their ears, pulling while the pigs made pathetic piggish moans. Two servants with guns ran in behind the dogs, fired two shots, and injured two pigs, sending the dogs into a feverous rage. Soon the yard was cleaned of pigs and the dogs chased them down the road—they raised such dust, just like when in a militant and swinish fever they ran down that same road earlier to storm the yard. We headed to the birdhouse. It was in a total disarray of the highest order. All the birds were flying, hopping up and around, jumping, tossing about, running, and shouting in different voices: cackling, hissing, whistling, moaning, clucking, and crowing. My youngest son fired his gun. At first, avian society seemed to get even more agitated from the shot, but then right away it got dumbstruck and quieted down in an instant. Omelko took advantage of the moment and yelled, “Why are you all screaming for no reason? Tell us what you want. What do you need? We’ll do whatever you ask.” “Freedom! Freedom!” yelled the birds in their different languages. “Freedom! Freedom!” said Omelko, making fun of the birds. “Well, fine. We’ll give you freedom. Geese and ducks! There are your wild, untamed

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brethren—how high they fly! Fly up to them. We let you go. We’re not holding you back. You have wings, so fly!” “But how are we supposed to fly when we don’t have the strength for it?” cackled the geese. “Our ancestors were just as free as those who now fly up there. But you, tyrants, enslaved them, and our grandparents and parents were descendant from them, so we were all born in slavery. Because of our enslavement, none of us know how to fly like those who remain free.” “That’s not our fault,” said Omelko: “Think it through with your own goose brains and duck brains. Was it us who took away your freedom? Did we do something to you so you can’t fly up there anymore? We’ve had you since you hatched, and from those first days until now, you’ve never known how to fly; and your fathers and grandfathers who lived here also couldn’t fly like the wild, free ones. Your race has been subordinate to man for so long that not only do your goose brains not recall, but even we with our human minds don’t know how long ago it was! The ones who enslaved your ancestors are long gone. How are we who now live on this earth to blame for your inability to take flight? We are setting you free! Fly! And if you don’t know how, then don’t blame us.”

The geese responded, “We don’t have the strength to fly, so we’re staying with you. Just don’t butcher us. We want to live.” After the geese, the ducks quacked out a similar idea. Omelko responded: “You want to live, you say. But I assume you also want to eat. So you expect us to feed you but not get any use out of you? No, no, that won’t work. Fly away if you don’t want us to butcher you. Fly away to your freedom. We’re not holding you back. But if you want to stay with us and want us to feed you, then give us something in return. We feed you, and so we eat you. We expect food from you because we give you food. Why is it such a travesty if once in a while the cook butchers your brother goose for stew? It’s not like he butchers all of you at once! It would be worse if you were set free and then a ferocious animal or angry bird would attack you. It would destroy you all in one go. Over here, the cook takes two or three geese or ducks to be butchered. But for that, you can stay here and be well cared for. You’d never survive on your own like you do here. Go ahead, try—fly away and live free!”

“How are we supposed to fly when we don’t have the strength?” repeated the geese. The ducks said the same with their quacks. “Then live peacefully and don’t riot!” Omelko said commandingly. He turned to the chickens: “And you, dumb chickens! You too wanted to fly! Then fly, hurry up and take flight and explore the clouds up there, find out how they live without you in complete freedom. But you stupids can’t even get ten feet off the ground—you’d be eaten up by ferrets, cats, swallows and eagles; kite birds would snatch up your chicks, and magpies and crows wouldn’t let you lay your

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eggs! Dummies, you’re stuffed dummies! You more than any of the other birds on earth can’t live without us brother humans. Accept it, stupids, and submit: this is our fate, you and me. We have to watch over you and feed you, and for that we butcher you and take your eggs.”

The chickens started cackling and making the most disgraceful noises. The rooster let out a lively cock-a-doodle-doo, which, as Omelko explained, meant they acknowledged the fairness of our demands and promised total obedience. It looked like all the birds had calmed down and were content, except the turkeys, who were groaning and complaining, as usual, about their hapless and irreversible fate. Omelko headed over to the sheep and goats. Those sheep who had managed to make it across the ravine were still standing in a group and not moving forward, looking stupidly back at their fallen brothers in the ravine. The poor things were thrashing around at the bottom of the ravine and didn’t know how to climb out along its steep walls. While they could have gotten out by just walking straight along the bottom of the trench, the sheep weren’t sharp enough to figure that out. As soon as they saw Omelko approaching them, the goats—who were standing up at the front—started stomping their legs and trying to display their caprine dignity by raising their bearded faces and butting their heads as if to say, “don’t come near us—we’ll stab you!”. But Omelko, picking up a long switch, struck one after the other on the side and scared them away. He then called over the herders and ordered them to pull the sheep out from the bottom of the ravine and chase them back to the pen. “Look at me,” he shouted at the sheep. “If you think of revolting again, you’ll suffer! We will demand that the head instigators be used for lard! Look, idiots! They wanted freedom, they got it! You dummies would have all been eaten by wolves if we humans had set you free! Be grateful that we are so kindhearted and forgive you for your stupidity!” The sheep bleated gratefully, as Omelko demanded. Having been granted total freedom by Omelko, the herds of cattle and horses ran first to the field and gave into a wild ecstasy: they hopped around, jumped, ran, mooed, snorted, neighed, and—in a display of shared joy—stood up on their hind legs and hugged one another. By then, August was already coming to a close. The fields had been flattened and mowed, the grains carted off and stored in haystacks. There were only a few dozen grains left, the kinds that got harvested last. The animals descended upon the remaining row of buckwheat and trampled it so badly that not even one stalk remained. They went in search of another unharvested field of grain, and when they found one, they did the same there. But soon, the harmony between the hoofed and the horned—established only recently during their shared fight for freedom—disintegrated. Honestly, I don’t know how the disagreement arose, but I know that the cattle started butting at the

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horses, who in return started kicking them back, leading both to head off in different directions. Afterward, both herds experienced an internal division. The cause was apparently a fight between males over females, probably not unlike human fights over who gets the best land, fights which are often the cause of broken agreements and friendships and lead to sad endings. Both the cattle and the horses split off into groups and, after separating from the mass, walked further away from their former comrades. Omelko knew the animal traditions so well that he had already prepared for this eventuality when he set them free. He then focused on those who had split off. He found those herds of cattle and horses roaming separately and by his sheer eloquence was able to convince them and the others to return to the village. He lured them with promises of much hay and oats for the horses. Some who had split off from the pack had gotten into other people’s fields, ruined their grains, stolen hay off the stacks in the fields, and found themselves once again captive. Hearing of their fate, Omelko bought these animals back from other owners, paying for the losses inflicted and shepherding them back to the village. Finally, as Omelko predicted, only the most zealous and stubborn animals roamed the fields until late autumn, when snow started to fall and there was nothing left on the stalks. Last fall, as you likely know, this happened earlier than usual. Seeing that there was nothing for them to eat in the fields, the animals sobered up from the luring yet vain hope for freedom and began returning to their pens of their own accord. Then came the humbled agitators: the bull who roused the cattle and the chestnut stallion who urged the equine race to revolt. Both suffered a harsh punishment: the bull’s sentence, decided by Omelko and confirmed by me, was execution—bludgeoning to death by a club—and the stallion was neutered, harnessed to a yoke and made to haul heavy things. And by the way, the punishments—equal to the crimes—were meted out after a fair and unbiased investigation carried out by Omelko. This is how our animal riot ended, an extraordinary event, peculiar and— as far as we know—never before heard of anywhere else. With winter approaching, everything has quieted down, but only spring will show what’s next. It’s impossible to guarantee that next summer, or sometime in future, the same wonders we saw won’t repeat themselves, though the prudent and vigilant Omelko is taking active measures to ensure this never happens to us again. Tanya Paperny is a writer, translator, and editor whose work has appeared in (selected) The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, Washington City Paper, Vice, The Millions, The Literary Review, The Massachusetts Review, and PANK Magazine; awards, grants and fellowships from The Tusculum Review, Art Omi, Poets & Writers, Vermont Studio Center and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities; recipient of the 2021 Hazel Rowley Prize from Biographers International Organization; MFA in Nonfiction Writing and Literary Translation, Columbia University.

2022: The War of Passive Aggression: Orwell’s (Yes, “Orwellian”) Forever Cold War, and Now China

A few years back, I had an office on Crosby Street, which slashes from Houston to Canal Street, never quite in one neighborhood, but always, seemingly, in two: Nolita and Soho, then Soho and Chinatown. The office was in a loft building down by Howard Street, with a back entrance that hoisted its long staircase over a teashop: pork buns and egg cakes and really quite terrible coffee, at fifty cents a cup. The almond cookies were incredible, but sometimes tasted like ammonia. Bad idea to complain: they would shout at you about your karma. Each day, drifting past my morning hours and toward the juncture where my quiet, alone work slowed into hunger and the prospect of a busy afternoon, I would consider the options: lunch in Soho, lunch in Chinatown, or four pieces of fruit from the fruit lady. Lunch in Soho was the classy selection: Gourmet Garage was expensive but always delicious and only occasionally food-poisoned me; Chinatown was cheap but hit or miss and also only occasionally poisonous; and the fruit lady was charming and loud and once, convincingly informed me that four pieces of fruit equaled a meal (no! not three, four!). Chinatown offered the more ample menu, and adventure. I’d tried all kinds of things. Having grown up just a little farther downtown, I was a longtime practitioner of the roast pork; the loins hung behind sweaty windows, and were chopped for you by weight. The other pork option, less prevalent but not infrequent: half of a whole animal hung in the window, baked or broiled in some mysterious fashion which generated a delicately caramelized crust— a crème brûlée of fat and skin. But I’d had only partial success ordering the brûlée, which was also sold by weight. I’d point and say a half pound, and most of the time they’d give me the roast pork instead. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Reed, The Never End, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_12

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I had the Crosby Street space for years, and over time, this inability to order presented a confounding obstacle. I would carefully point, and make my request, but there would follow some debate as to meaning. “What do you want?” they would ask me, and I would say I didn’t know the name of it, and it wasn’t on the menu, but that, over there, and they would look at the side of meat, and me, and pick up the cleaver, and pull down, in all probability, a slab of the pork loin. Not the brûlée. There was the language barrier, and any clarification proved evasive. I couldn’t get my message through. I scoured Chinatown, one place after another, trying to figure out how to order the delicacy in the window, without consistent success, or any indication of progress. The people at the counter were brusque and efficient, and had no time for questions; it was the lunch blitz and there were lines and they were throwing around money and food, and your order was to be issued clearly and definitively, or they made the executive decision. On Canal Street, on the south side, just west of Lafayette, there was a place where I’d try to order the brûlée. And one afternoon, out on my sometimes mission, I saw that I would be squaring off against a different counter person— she was maybe the daughter of someone who worked there or owned the place or something like that. Her English, I began to realize, was much easier for me to understand. I waited my turn, and when I made my order, we did the dance: what do you want, where is it, etcetera. She was puzzled—then slowed for a moment to ask me a second time what I wanted. And then, shazam, she understood. “Oh, you want the pig.” So that’s what that was called. The pig. In remembering this story, I see myself as oafish, uninformed, and clomping around with big feet. Jacob Dreyer, the editor of this manuscript, warned me against trying to explain China in this collection; the Western compunction to represent and discuss and politicize around China has been a catastrophe of bluster for known history, and the twentieth and twenty-first century in particular. David Bowie, the seductive grim reaper, weaves our colonialism, racism, and xenophobia into a tight coil with his 1983 release, “China Girl.”1 My little China girl You shouldn’t mess with me I’ll ruin everything you are You know I’ll give you television I’ll give you eyes of blue I’ll give you a man who wants to rule the world.

1

From the album, Let’s Dance. RCA.

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Through the twentieth and now twenty-first century, our Western attitudes toward China have been perilously fraught with our own fantasies and fears: we are unable to pull ourselves from the center of the universe. Orwell, midcentury, could see China only through the lens of expediency, and despite the general fear of China becoming a communist state, Orwell’s war commentaries applauded China’s military achievements and the nation’s ability to, at the very least, slow Japan’s advance. Much of Orwell’s World War II analysis is now inscrutable in terms of the day to day actions, but with necessity as justification, Orwell held his nose and condoned the coalition; with the end of the war, however, in the divvying of the spoils of Allied victory and repayment of any debt due China, Orwell’s tone took on an underlying menace. Back in 1935 or 1936 when it became clear that a Japanese invasion of China was imminent, many outside observers considered that nothing could be done to stop the Japanese, because the Chinese peasants had little sense of nationality and modern armaments hardly existed on the Chinese side. As it turned out, these predictions were quite false. Ever since 1937 the Japanese have been engaged in an exhausting war in which they have gained very little material benefit, lost great numbers of men, reduced the standard of living of their own working class and alienated millions of Orientals who might otherwise have been on their side. The reason was that there existed in China a strong popular political movement which could fire the peasants and the town working-class and make them ready to struggle against the invader, pitting their numbers and their courage against superior armaments. Against very heavily mechanized armies, such as the German army, mere popular resistance with rifles and hand grenades may perhaps be ineffective, though the success of the Russian guerillas makes even this doubtful. But against the sort of army that the Japanese have employed in China, or the sort of army that they are likely to be able to use for the invasion of India—that is an army mainly of infantry—guerilla methods can be highly successful and the “scorched earth” policy can immensely hamper the invader. … The British and United States Governments have just announced that they are relinquishing all extra-territorial rights in China. This applies to Free China immediately, and will apply to the whole of China after the war. For about a century past various European nations have had concessions in Shanghai, Tientsin and other Chinese cities, and they were not subject to Chinese law, and also had the power to station their own troops in China and to enjoy various other privileges. This is now coming to an end as the result of an agreement between the British, American and Chinese governments. This step not only demonstrates the mutual trust and friendship between China and the rest of the United Nations, but marks the final emergence of China as a modern nation on an equality with the western powers.2

The extra-territorial rights were returned to China, as Orwell reported; Stalin was the more pressing enemy, but from the outset of the post-World War 2

Edited by W.J. West. Orwell: The War Commentaries. Pantheon, 1985. Pages 78, 164.

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II balance of the international powers, and China “as a modern nation on an equality with western powers,” the West started wondering when China would become the real threat, the more proper negative variable for a Cold War equation. (Orwell coined the term “Cold War” and/or popularized it as of his 1945, Tribune essay “You and the Atomic Bomb.”) As is neatly summarized by Geoff Martin and Erin Steuter in Pop Culture Goes to War (Lexington Books, 2010): After the Korean War the United States was fully engrossed in what came to be called the Cold War, a not-quite-war in which the United States and its NATO allies would prepare for war but would not fight directly with the main adversary, the Soviet Union and its allies in the Warsaw Pact. The 1950s saw increased military expenditures, including US funding of the French colonial war in Indochina, and then Americanization of the war in Vietnam in the early to mid-1960s. The United States was “at war with Asia” for over twenty-five years, half of which saw direct US military involvement. This was also the McCarthy period, in which US citizens who were allegedly procommunist and prosocialist were branded “un-American” and hauled in front of congressional committees, fired from their jobs, and blacklisted from the education sector and the entertainment industry.

The Guardian, in our contemporary moment,3 sounds the trumpets—China is a villain worthy of an Orwell dystopia: What’s now unfolding could be portrayed as the ultimate fulfillment of George Orwell’s nightmarish vision, in his dystopian novel, 1984, of a world divided geographically, politically and militarily into three rival superstates: Oceania (North America plus Britain), Eurasia (Russia and Europe), and Eastasia (China). Publication of Orwell’s book in 1949 coincided with the formation of the US-led North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the emergence of Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union as a nuclear-armed power. It also saw the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China by Mao Zedong. Yet these were early days. Orwell’s prediction of an endless, three-way global confrontation proved premature. China needed time to develop. The Soviet Union eventually imploded. The US [sic], declaring a unipolar moment, claimed victory. Yet today, by some measures, Orwell’s tripartite world is finally coming into being. 2021 is the new 1984.

But hardly. The news of China as the new Cold War archenemy is as curiously gratuitous as it is banal. The clash of the West v. China is a war of myopia, a total inability of the West to see beyond its own eyelids. At least we knew

3 Simon Tisdall. “China v Russia v America: Is 2021 the Year Orwell’s 1984 Comes True?” The Guardian, April 11, 2021.

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Russia well enough to demonize it. Kurt Vonnegut, in his 1976 novel, Slapstick,4 pits the United States against China in an allegorical battle: the Chinese shrink themselves to a scale that causes Westerners to perish by their inhalation. Thriving as a result of scientific advancements, the Chinese thereafter renounce any US presence or association. The miniaturization of human beings in China had progressed so far at that point, that their ambassador was only sixty centimeters tall. His farewell was polite and friendly. He said his country was severing relations simply because there was no longer anything going on in the United States which was of any interest to the Chinese at all.

Vonnegut’s character Eliza, when asked why the ambassador had been “so right,” replies, “What civilized country could be interested in a hellhole like America, where everybody takes such lousy care of their own relatives?”. On October 12, 2022, President Joe Biden and his administration outlined a National Security Strategy that prioritized “Out Competing China.” The document isn’t wholly antagonistic, but its call for “peaceful coexistence” recalls Orwell’s similarly inane “mutual trust and friendship.” The PRC [People’s Republic of China] is the only competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it. Beijing has ambitions to create an enhanced sphere of influence in the Indo-Pacific and to become the world’s leading power. It is using its technological capacity and increasing influence over international institutions to create more permissive conditions for its own authoritarian model, and to mold global technology use and norms to privilege its interests and values. Beijing frequently uses its economic power to coerce countries. It benefits from the openness of the international economy while limiting access to its domestic market, and it seeks to make the world more dependent on the PRC while reducing its own dependence on the world. The PRC is also investing in a military that is rapidly modernizing, increasingly capable in the Indo-Pacific, and growing in strength and reach globally—all while seeking to erode US alliances in the region and around the world. At the same time, the PRC is also central to the global economy and has a significant impact on shared challenges, particularly climate change and global public health. It is possible for the United States and the PRC to coexist peacefully, and share in and contribute to human progress together.

4

Kurt Vonnegut. Slapstick. Delacorte Press, 1976.

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Technology is of course the inflection: Apple makes plans to get out of China5 ; China, rather annoyingly, has easily taken steps toward containing the influence of social media (steps which have proved elusive to US regulators)6 ; China is engaging in a massive program of surveilling its own citizens,7 and maybe the citizens of the world.8 But these and other economic disputes with China feel less like outright confrontation and more like ongoing negotiation. Apple’s Tim Cook, while divesting operations from China, simultaneously invested 275 billion dollars into technological infrastructure and training, and a long-term commitment to a China/Apple relationship.9 Jacob Dreyer, the editor of this collection, in considering China’s space program, took a tour of the space museum in Wenchang. On the long taxi ride home, Dreyer pondered the America of the 50s and 60s, which took us to the moon, and serves to some degree as an inspiration for China’s space efforts, and is effectively no longer there. The impediment to the Cold War with China is that our side is gone. For many years, the American version of the story goes, the United States traded with China—ideas, objects, commodities, technologies—in the hope that China would become a democracy like ours. But this failed, and so we stopped. But what if China did start to become like the US—the lost world of men in gray flannel suits, suburban expansion and quiet prosperity? The America that the Chinese encountered after the reform and opening period was one of material abundance, technological accomplishment and cultural chauvinism, which has filtered into Chinese society via mimesis fueled by millions of Chinese people who have spent time in the United States—a demographic overrepresented in China’s scientific community. Scratch a Chinese rocket scientist and you’ll find a person reminiscent about Trader Joe’s, about the luxurious experience of tasting Häagen-Dazs, about years in a suburb of Boston, San Diego, Chicago.

5 Henry Olsen. “Apple is beginning to move out of China. It is an overdue reckoning.” The Washington Post , December 5, 2022; Yang Jie & Aaron Tilley. “Apple Makes Plans to Move Production Out of China.” The Wall Street Journal, December 3, 2022; Daisuke Wakabayashi. “Tech Companies Slowly Shift Production Away From China.” The New York Times , September 1, 2022. 6 Muyi Xiao, Paul Mozur and Gray Beltran. “Buying Influence: How China Manipulates Facebook and Twitter.” The New York Times, December 20, 2021; “Beijing Is Intensifying Its Global Push for Media Influence, Turning to More Covert and Aggressive Tactics.” Freedom House, September 8, 2022. Press Release. 7 Josh Chin & Liza Lin. “The Two Faces of China’s Surveillance State.” The Wall Street Journal, September 2, 2022; Brian Spegele. “China’s Surveillance State Pushes Deeper Into Citizens’ Lives.” The Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2022. 8 Evan Selinger. “A warning from China’s surveillance state: It could happen here.” The Boston Globe, October 5, 2022; Zeyi Yang. “The Chinese surveillance state proves that the idea of privacy is more “malleable” than you’d expect.” MIT Technology Review, October 10, 2022; Rachel Treisman. “The FBI alleges TikTok poses national security concerns.” NPR, November 17, 2022. 9 Samuel Axon. “Report: Apple CEO Tim Cook engineered a secret $275 billion deal with China.” Ars Technica, December 7, 2021.

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The generation of Americans who watched the rockets taking off from Cape Canaveral has grown up and had children now. Over those years, the utopian promise of America’s 1960s scientific development failed to culminate in the egalitarian society many dreamed of. And in China, emulating America’s social and economic model has led to empty consumerism, income inequality and monopoly capitalism. My taxi driver had a simple explanation for all of this. Wealth doesn’t last three generations, he told me; China is now in the second generation, traditionally of consolidating wealth, and America in the dissolute squandering phase, one that lends itself to the sort of talk of revolution that was found in China a century ago.10

Is Xi Jinping Big Brother?11 What would Orwell say about Brexit?12 Such questions are ponderably imponderable; any answers are inconclusive; and any applicability is absurd. Orwell’s Cold War is another McGuffin. It’s easy enough to troll through the Orwell archive and cherry pick what’s relevant, what’s effective, and what’s ridiculous. You could tiptoe through 1984 and select passages that relate to you right now, passages on: frenzied rallies; lying leaders; Trumpish men; propaganda and patriotism; and xenophobia.13 You could muse, fifty years later, on the pertinence of Orwell’s “Politics and The English Language.”14 Maybe the next Cold War should be with India, which surpassed China in total population this year.15 What would Orwell have to say?16 The efforts are useful and futile; our Orwell obsessions are revelatory of ourselves, and yet our consciousness and our consciousness of Orwell has so evolved that we have lost our memory of the referent. Orwell, in criticism and cultural beatification, is exemplary of fifty years of postmodernism; the signifier has become the signified. His grand gift of writing so clearly about so much with so little constancy and so much equivocation has left us a legacy of a 10

“China Dreams of a Palace in the Sky.” Noema, 2022.

11

Lizzie O’Leary and Josh Chin. “Big Brother, Big Tech, and China.” Slate, October 30, 2022. 12 Krishnadev Calamur. “Brexit: What Would George Orwell Do?” The Atlantic, June 23, 2016. 13 Emily Temple. “All of the Passages in 1984 That Relate to You Right Now.” Literary Hub, April 15, 2019. 14

Sanford Pinsker. “Musings About Orwell’s “Politics and The English Language—50 Years Later.” The University of Virginia Quarterly, December 12, 2003: “Looking back at Orwell’s essay from the vantage point of a half century, one quickly realizes how it is possible to be simultaneously prescient and short-sighted, for Orwell could feel the intimations that would lead to our current conviction that ‘everything is political’ without being able to fully imagine the pretentiousness and tin-eared jargon that such reductiveness would unleash.” 15 Pushkar Raj. “Orwellian Dystopia Is Here, So Is The New India.” Outlook India, June 19, 2020; Archana Chaudhary. “India to Surpass China as Most-Populous Nation in 2023.” Bloomberg, July 11, 2022. 16 Jutta Paczulla. “Talking to India: George Orwell’s Work at the BBC, 1941–1943.” Canadian Journal of History, volume 42, issue 1, Spring 2007.

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trick mirror.17 Any attempts at “Orwell Studies’” are axiomatically solipsistic. As Luis Menand gently concludes in “Honest, Decent, Wrong,”18 Orwell’s prose was so effective that it seduced many readers into imagining, mistakenly, that he was saying what they wanted him to say, and what they themselves thought. Orwell was not clairvoyant; he was not infallible; he was not even consistent. He changed his mind about things, as most writers do. He dramatized out of a desire to make the world more the way he wished it to be, as most writers do. He also said what he thought without hedging or trimming, as few writers do all the time. It is strange how selectively he was heard. It is no tribute to him to turn his books into anthems to a status quo he hated. Orwell is admired for being a paragon when he was, self-consciously, a naysayer and a misfit. If he is going to be welcomed into the pantheon of right-thinking liberals, he should at least be allowed to bring along his goat.

Orwell himself understood the aloneness of interpretation. Writing about radio in his 1945 essay, “Poetry and the Microphone,”19 he just as well may have been describing the inherent isolation in our modern consumption of news, via media or social media. The special advantage of the radio, its power to select the right audience … ought here to be noticed. In broadcasting your audience is conjectural, but it is an audience of one. Millions may be listening, but each is listening alone, or as a member of a small group, and each has (or ought to have) the feeling that you are speaking to him individually.

The Orwell grammar-snob correction goes like this: the term Orwellian should not indicate people, places, or things that are like Big Brother, or like Animal Farm, or somehow fascistic or oppressive or surveilling—on the contrary, these were the objects of Orwell’s loathing. The argument is as commonplace as it is shortsighted.20 The terrible truth, the horrific irony, is that Orwell did collaborate with covert operations, the secret police, and did participate, however successfully, in a blacklist operation; the term Orwellian, as formerly defined, is perfectly correct.21 The anti-historical defenders of Orwell—those who say such lists never happened, those who excuse Orwell with platitudes 17 Jia Tolentino. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. Random House, August 6, 2019. 18

The New Yorker, January 20, 2003.

19

The New Saxon Pamphlet, No. 3. March 1945 (written 1943?).

20

Barbara VanDenburgh. “You’re using the term ‘Orwellian’ wrong. Here’s what George Orwell was actually writing about.” USA Today, January 11, 2021; Jason Slotkin. “Stop Taking Orwell’s Name in Vain.” The Atlantic, June 19, 2013. 21 Orwell’s lists are widely known and discussed. For overviews of Orwell’s Lists, see, in this collection, “The Never End”; “Animal Farm Timeline”; and “George Orwell’s ‘The Freedom of the Press,’ a Proposed Preface to Animal Farm, expurgated and footnoted (with a bias).”

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or sentimentality or finger pointing—22 are members of a club with fewer and fewer, crazier and crazier recruits. (Compare the election denying, anti-vax crowd; indeed, many of the Orwell congregants worship at the temple of Trump.) People no longer doubt, and quite possibly don’t care, that George was the author of such toxic hypocrisy. Does that say as much about ourselves as it does about Orwell? It’s so easy to sympathize: he sold his soul. If there is to be any enduring, to use Louis Menand’s phrasing, “honesty or decency” in the icon of Orwell, it is betrayals included. In his 1941 essay “England your England,”23 Orwell parallels the changing of nations to the changing of individuals: [England] is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavor of its own. Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature. What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

As of 2022, the question of Cold War, United States v. China, is met with an answer of nothingness. The imagined America of the erstwhile confrontation, a forecast of an unfuture, is as absent as is its imagined nemesis—a China of fanciful formulation that would never be and never was. The exertion of our present-day framework onto the past is an imperialism unto itself. Even the premise of the stark contour of a nation is a vestigial absurdity; how can we have a Cold War, with anyone, when our best and worst future is globalization? Where is this Cold War? Where, really, are its borders? Our tariffs and legislations are as ephemeral and nationless as weather. And if Orwell is the founding father of the Cold War, where has he gone? He is everywhere and nowhere to the degree that there is no Orwell—only a cascading attrition of citations, half-lies, and history receded, gone on the horizon. Orwell and our Cold Wars are at the never end, with one decimal place after another still tabulating—tabulating eternally in this irrational number—always that much more exact and trivial.

22 Orwell’s apologists and their remedial literary criticism are discussed in the introductory essay to this collection, “The Never End.” 23

Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius. Secker & Warburg, 1941.

Index

0–9 1984, 9, 11, 12, 44, 50, 52, 68, 79, 81, 82, 85, 87, 89, 101, 108, 132, 134, 136, 147, 148, 151, 174, 177 2 Live Crew, 16, 73 2002, v, 2–4, 8, 16, 59, 63, 65–67, 69, 79, 104, 107, 133, 140, 147, 149 30 under 30, 128 9/11/Twin Towers, 2, 15, 59, 63, 78, 103, 108, 133, 140, 141, 149, 150

A A&E, 129 ABC, 52 Abolitionists, 131 Adamovsky, Ezequiel, 125 Adorno, Theodor W., 114, 131 Afghanistan, 59, 105, 108, 137 Alexander the Great, 109 Alford, Matthew, 53 All the World’s a Grave, 6, 7 America, 12, 46, 105, 107–109, 116, 130, 175–177, 179 Amis, Martin, 4, 71, 110 Animal Farm, 2, 4, 5, 7–12, 15, 16, 18, 22, 28, 35, 41, 50, 52, 63, 64, 66–68, 70–72, 78–82, 84, 86–88, 90–92, 100, 101, 105, 108–110, 118, 133, 134, 136–141, 147–149, 151, 152, 178

“Animal Riot”, 10, 18, 20, 22, 66, 71, 78–85, 89–92, 99–101, 109, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 169 Anti-semitism, 56 Apostles, 121 Apple, 176 Ardbeg, 3 Ars Technica, 176 Artforum, 118 “Arts & Letters”, 26 Ash, Timothy Garten, 7, 30, 41 Asia, 33, 41, 42, 122, 174 Atomic Bomb, 32, 174 Australia, 65, 67, 74–76 Axon, Samuel, 176 Aylesford Sanatorium, 89

B Banjo, David, 127 Barbier, Auguste, 86 Barnes & Noble (B&N), 64, 74, 76, 130 Barney, Mathew, 119 Bates, Stephen, 61 Battle of Trafalgar, 68 BBC , 3, 8, 24, 26, 28, 41, 59, 65, 68, 79, 83, 84, 108, 137, 149, 151 Beijing, 175 Bellow, Saul, 124 Beltran, Gray, 176 Belushi, John, 116

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 J. Reed, The Never End, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6

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INDEX

Berlin Wall, 141 Berrigan, Philip, 132 Bessie, Alvah, 39 Biberman, Herbert, 39 Biden, Joe, 175 Big Brother, 11, 12, 52, 70, 132, 177, 178 “Big six”, 125, 128 “Bin Ladenist”, 3, 67, 74, 76, 109, 151 Black Ink Books, 59 Blacklist(s), 3, 4, 39, 110, 178 Blake, Paul, 114 Blitz, the lightning pick-me-up, 125 Blok, Aleksander, 82, 86, 87 Bloom, Harold, 81 Boer, Lisette, 11 Bono, Sonny, 113, 116, 117 Book-of-the-Month Club, 35 Borkenau, Franz, 56 Boston, 176 Boston Tea Party, 131 Bounds, Phillip, 83 Bowie, David, 119, 172 Brand, Max (Frederick Schiller Faust), 124 Brando, Marlon, 116 Brennan, Summer, 11 Brexit, 177 Britain, 41, 56, 174 British Secret Service, 2, 4, 11, 68, 79, 90, 91, 110, 126, 148 Broadway, 141 Brockmeier, Kevin, 124 Bubonic plague, 116 Bulgakov, Mikhail, 79 Buni, Catherine, 10 Bunt , 12, 80 Burke, Edmund, 51 Burnham, James, 32 Butler, Blake, 128 Byrne, David, 119

C Cagney, James, 53 Calamur, Krishnadev, 177 California, 3, 56, 76, 86, 114 Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 73 Canal Street, 171, 172

Cantabria, 148 Cape Canaveral, 177 Cape, Jonathan, 28 Catholic Church, 68 Caute, David, 61 Celtic/Celt, 131 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 2, 7, 15, 42, 46, 50, 52, 68, 70, 71, 79, 91, 136, 148, 151 Chaplin, Charlie, 55, 71, 115 Chaudhary, Archana, 177 Chayanov, A.V./Botanik X, 81, 85 Cheap Today, 1 Chekhov, Anton, 89 Chelsea, NYC, 115, 116 Chicago, 176 China, 3, 4, 11, 12, 41, 53, 172–177, 179 Chinatown, 171, 172 Chin, Josh, 177 Christianity, 121 Chumak, 98, 158 Churchill, Winston, 68, 105 Civil disobedience, 131 Civil rights, 131 Clinton, Hillary, 135 Cockburn, Alex, 2, 85, 135, 147 “Cold War”, 2, 3, 12, 15, 16, 32, 35, 41, 46, 50, 51, 53, 59, 68, 70, 71, 79, 90, 103–105, 107, 109, 110, 132–134, 136, 137, 139, 141, 147–149, 151, 174, 176, 177, 179 Cole, Lester, 39 Columbia University, 67, 169 Comics, 122, 123 Comix, 122, 127 Commentary, 56 Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), 2, 15, 32, 46, 51, 64, 90, 91, 101, 126, 134, 151 Conquest, Robert, 41 Constantine, 121, 131 Contemporary Review, 52 Contempt of Congress, 39 Cook, Tim, 176 Cooper, Lettice, 91 Cooper Union, 2, 4, 5, 138 Copyright, 6, 16, 59, 66, 67, 101, 109, 113, 114, 136, 149

INDEX

Crick, Bernard, 9, 41, 55, 71, 73, 85, 101 Crime/criminals, 63, 114, 115, 122, 128, 131, 169 Crime and Punishment , 22, 136 Crosby Street, 171, 172 “Crypto-communists”, 33, 56, 68

D Danticat, Edwidge, 131 Davison, Peter Hobley, 44, 61, 83, 87, 104 D-Day, 136 Delvoye, Wim, 119 Department of State, 50 Deshon, Florence, 115 Deutscher, Isaac, 85 Dial Press, 28, 127 Dillon, E.J., 84 Divorce, 30, 123 Dmytryk, Edward, 39 Donadio, Rachel, 3, 69, 74, 76 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 6, 22, 80, 114, 136 Doyle, Judith, 1 Dreyer, Jacob, 12, 172, 176 Duggan, Mark, 128

E Eastman, Max, 115 Economist , 18, 66, 101, 133, 138 Ekevall, Kay, 83 Eldred, Eric, 113 Eliot, T.S., 22, 28, 68, 109 Ellison, Sarah, 127 Elliston, Jon, 50 Empson, William, 28, 68 Encounter, 32

F Faber & Faber, 28 “Fake news”, 150 Fantasia, 119 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 52, 53, 176 Fen, Elisaveta (Lydia Jackson), 5, 89–91 Financial Times , 10

183

Foer, Jonathan Safran, 128, 129 Ford Foundation, 32 Franco, Francisco, 148 “Freedom of the Press”, 11, 63, 67, 72, 80, 109, 133, 142, 148, 149, 178 Frost, Robert, 113

G Gable, Clark, 50 Gacy, John Wayne, 115 Gandhi, Mahatma, 106, 110 Gangrel , 12, 104 Garner, Dwight, 61 Garnett, Constance, 142 Gaultier, Jean Paul, 113, 115 Gibran, Kahlil, 91 Gilly, Darcy, 57 Giuliani, Rudy, 142 “G” Men, 53 “God Save the Queen”, 1 Goldring, Douglas, 55 Gollancz, Victor, 28 Google, 67, 73, 76, 120 Gorky, Maxim, 82, 85 Gourmet Garage, 171 Gray, Spalding, 6

H Häagen-Dazs, 176 Halas & Batchelor, 50 Hamilton, Bill, 59 Hantavirus, 116 Harcourt Brace, 35, 88 Harlequin, 123 Harper’s Magazine, 18, 71, 77, 153, 169 Hirst, Damien, 119 Hitchens, Christopher, 2–5, 7, 8, 16, 59, 65, 67, 104, 105, 107–111, 133–135, 137, 138, 140, 147, 151 Hitler, Adolph, 4, 24, 51, 104, 105, 110, 136 Hitler-Stalin Pact, 24 Hollywood, 6, 53, 120, 131 “Hollywood Ten”, 39 Homophobia, 4, 7, 55, 110 Hoover, J. Edgar, 52

184

INDEX

House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 39 Housing Works, 67 Howard Street, 171 Howe, Irving, 12 Hrushevsky, Mykhailo, 20, 22, 80, 82, 84, 85 Hugo, Victor, 117 Hunt, Howard, 50 Hutchinson & Co, 84 Huxley, Aldous, 82, 89

I Imperial Indian Police, 168 Independent Labor Party (ILP), 24 Information Research Department (IRD), 3, 4, 8, 32, 41, 42, 51, 55, 57, 59, 68, 70, 91, 104, 110 Iraq, 59, 103, 105, 108, 135, 137 Ireland, Kathy, 113, 115 Irving, Washington, 108 Islam, 3, 103

J Jackson, Michael, 120 Japan, 105, 173 Jenkins, Tricia, 53 Jesus, 105, 121, 137 “Jews”, 56, 137 Jie, Yang, 176 Jinping, Xi, 12, 177 Josselson, Michael, 46

K Kaganovich, Lazar, 56 Kelley, Mike, 119 Kennedy, John F., 116 Kerouac, Jack, 114 Kerouac, Jan, 114 “Kill All Artists”, 115 Kindred, David, 127 Kirwan, Celia (Paget), 8, 30, 37, 41, 55, 91 Kirwan, Patrick, 30 Koestler, Arthur, 8, 30, 41, 42, 46, 55, 71, 82, 85, 91

Koons, Jeff, 119 Korean War, 174 Kostomarov, Nikolai, 10, 18, 77–79, 81, 84, 109, 133, 153 Krieger, Maria, 91

L Labatt, Tony, 119 Lafayette Street, 2, 15, 139 Lardner Jr., Ring, 39 Lashmar, Paul, 41 Lasky, Melvin, 32 Lawson, John Howard, 39 Leab, Daniel, 50 Lessig, Lawrence, 113 Lewis, Charles, 135 Limbaugh, Rush, 65 Lin, Liza, 176 Literary Hub, 10, 11, 147, 177 “Little squib”, 78, 87 London, 28, 30, 48, 82–84, 86, 88–90, 128 London, Jack, 71, 81, 82, 85 “London Letters”, 10, 64, 125 Los Angeles Review of Books , 11 Luther Luckett Correctional Complex, 114 Lyme disease, 116

M Macdonald, Dwight, 44 Magnets, 135 Maltz, Albert, 39 Mandelstam, Nadezhda, 86 Mandelstam, Osip, 82, 85–89 Manzoni, Piero, 119 Margiela, Martin, 113, 115 Marriage, 8–10, 30, 78, 123 Martin, Geoff, 53, 174 Marxism/Marxist, 20, 46, 115, 133, 140, 148 Marx, Karl, 82, 83 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 79, 82 Mayhew, Christopher, 41 McCarthy, Joseph/McCarthyism, 8, 41, 55 McCarthy, Paul, 119

INDEX

McCartney, Paul, 119 Melville House, 4, 7, 103, 147 Menand, Louis, 7, 9, 10, 103, 104, 178, 179 Mickey Mouse/“Shitty Mickey”, 66, 113 Mihailovi´c, Dragoljub “Draža” (Colonel), 68 Mikhailovitch, Emilie, 84 Miller, John, 119 Ministry of Information (MOI), 8, 28, 64 Minnie Mouse, 120 Mishima, Yukio, 91 Mitchell, Margaret, 114 MobyLives , 103 Moore, Alan W., 126 Morley, Frank, 35 Mother Teresa, 104 Mozur, Paul, 176 Murray, Christopher John, 80

N National Security, 64, 175 Nelson, Horatio (Admiral Lord), 68 New York/New York City, 3, 52, 56, 70, 74, 76, 126, 141, 142 Nicolson, Benedict, 107 Niva, 18, 20, 83, 85, 153 Nobel Prize, 51, 91 Noema, 12, 177 Nolita, 171 Normandy, 136 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 174 NPR, 176

O Oceana, 53, 158 Occupy Wall Street, 128 Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), 50 Ofili, Chris, 119 Old Benjamin, 101 O’Leary, Lizzie, 177 Oliver, James, 41 Olsen, Henry, 176 Orbison, Roy, 73

185

O’Reilly, Bill, 65 Ornitz, Sam, 39 Orwell, Eileen (Blair/O’Shaughnessy), 5, 9, 89–91 Orwell, George (Eric Blair), 2, 4, 5, 8, 11, 12, 18, 22, 32, 41, 50, 61, 78, 103–107, 109, 111, 125–127, 133, 147, 174, 178 “Orwellian”, 115, 178 Orwell’s list(s), 2, 8, 9, 30, 55, 70, 71, 79, 101, 148, 178 Orwell, Sonia (Bronwell), 9–11, 48, 50, 52

P Paczulla, Jutta, 177 PANK Magazine, 153 Paperny, Tanya, 18, 80, 92, 136, 153 Paris Theatre, 52 Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), 91 Partisan Review, 10, 12, 24, 32, 56, 64, 108, 125 Pauleer, Anna, 56 Pekar, Harvey, 121–123 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 174, 175 Peters, Michael, 52 Picasso, Pablo, 114, 119 “Pinocchio Syndrome”, 120 Pinsker, Sanford, 177 Pitt, Brad, 53 Pitt-Rivers, Michael (Major), 48 Plowman, Dorothy, 91 Poe, Edgar Allen, 81 Polemic, 37, 88 Pollack, Jackson, 119 Prashad, Vojay, 32 Protest, 128, 131, 156 Protestant, 131 Protestant Reformation, 131 Prymak, Thomas M., 81 PS41, 2, 4 Public domain, 6, 66, 67, 80, 113, 117 Public school, 5, 68, 79, 108, 139, 151 Pushkin, Alexander, 82, 83

186

INDEX

Q Quasimodo, 117 Quinn, Anthony, 119 Quinn, Marc, 119

R Rachman, Tom, 127 Racism, 172 Raj, Pushkar, 177 Randall, Alice, 16, 66, 114 Random House, 125, 178 Rawson, Bretty, 134–142 Razin, Stephan “Stenka”, 83 Reading-Smith, Mark, 135 Red Army, 68 Red Channels , 39 Redford, Robert, 53 Redgrave, Michael, 52, 71 “Red Scare”, 55 Reed, David, 74 Reed, John (author of The Ten Days that Shook the World), 3, 5, 68, 138 Reefer Madness , 129 Republican Army, 55 Reymont, Wladyslaw Stanislaw, 12, 80 Robb, David L., 53 Rockefeller Foundation, 32 Rodden, John, 91 Rohde, Stephen, 11 Roof Books, v, 2, 16, 59, 64, 147 Rosenberg, Tina, 136 Rossi, John, 91 Rothacker, Jordan, 147–152 Rotten, Johnny, 119 Rubin, Andrew, 32, 41, 42, 46, 52 Rushdie, Salman, 4, 37, 109 Russell, Bertrand (Lord), 41, 51, 91, 135 Russia, 3, 24, 53, 64, 68, 82–84, 87, 89, 91, 134, 136, 138, 148, 154, 174, 175 Russian revolution, 18, 28, 68, 79, 83

S Said, Edward, 4, 110 “Saint George”, 4, 103, 148 Salm, Arthur, 69

Sanders, Bernard “Bernie”, 135 San Diego, 176 Saunders, David, 82, 101 Saunders, Frances Stonor, 9, 41, 46, 85 Savage, Derek “Stanley”, 10 Scott, Robert Adrian, 39 Secker & Walburg, 12, 28, 87, 104, 179 Selinger, Evan, 176 Sex, 6, 9, 123 Shakespeare, William, 6, 83, 84, 114, 115, 129, 155 Shaw, Tony, 41, 50 Shelden, Michael, 90 Sherry, James, 59, 64, 75, 76 Shevchenko, Taras, 82, 83 Situationist International, 126, 127 Slate, 177 Small Press Distribution (SPD), 64, 74, 76 Smith, Dinitia, 63 Smith, R.E.F., 81, 85 Snowball’s Chance, v, 2–4, 15, 16, 59, 63, 65–67, 69, 75, 79, 118, 133, 134, 136, 138, 139, 141, 147, 148, 150, 151 Soho, 171 So, Jimmy, 61 Soule, George, 35 Souter, David (Justice), 73 Souvarine, Boris, 91 Soviet, 20, 22, 35, 42, 52, 64, 68, 80, 86, 105, 111, 142, 174 Spain, 8, 22, 80, 91, 142, 148 Spanish Civil War, 8, 22, 55, 148 Special Branch, 61 Spegele, Brian, 176 Stalin, Joseph, 174 Stallone, Sylvester, 119 Star Magazine, 119 Steuter, Erin, 53, 174 Stewart, James, 53 Struve, Gleb Petrovich “Pyotr”, 81, 85–91 Supreme Court, 16, 66, 73, 113, 117 Swingler, Randall, 37, 65

T Tchertkoff, Vladimer, 84

INDEX

Temple, Emily, 177 Temple, Shirley, 115 The Atlantic, 177, 178 The Believer, 63, 81, 133, 149 The Book Of Matthew, 105 The Boston Globe, 65, 140, 151, 176 The Brooklyn Rail , 5, 107, 116, 118 The Brothers Karamazov, 80 The Catholic Herald, 68 The Comics Code Authority/Comics Code (CCA), 122, 123 The Daily Beast , 61 The Daily Worker, 68 The FBI , 52 The FBI Story, 53 The Guardian, 61, 174 The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 117 The Independent , 9, 55 The Mickey Mouse Club, 120 The Mudd Club, 1 The New English Weekly, 104 The New Leader, 56 The New Republic, 9, 35 The New Yorker, 7, 35, 103 The New York Press , 113, 116 The New York Review of Books , 7–9, 30, 44, 71 The New York Sun, 3, 69, 76 The New York Times , 7, 9, 52, 61, 63, 67, 69, 74, 76, 127, 176 The Observer, 11, 56, 57, 86 The Paris Review, 15, 46, 70, 79, 133, 138 The Portland Tribune, 66 The Rumpus , 146 The San Diego Union Tribune, 69 The Sex Pistols, 1, 2 The Times , 11 The Times Literary Supplement , 63, 72, 88, 89 The University of Virginia Quarterly, 177 The Washington Post , 176 Thomas, Deborah, 64, 74, 76 TikTok, 176 Tilley, Aaron, 176 Time Magazine, 52 Tisdall, Simon, 11, 174 Tito, Josip Broz (Marshal), 68

187

Tolentino, Jia, 178 Tolstoy, Leo, 82–84, 138 Torrents, 75, 94, 157 “Tory Anarchist”, 108 Trader Joe’s, 176 Treisman, Rachel, 176 Tribeca, 1, 15 Tribune, 24, 32, 89, 111, 126, 127, 174 Trotsky, Leon, 68 Trumbo, Dalton, 39 Trump, Donald, 11, 70, 135, 148, 149, 179 Turgenev, Alexander, 86 Twain, Mark, 107

U Ukraine, 20, 68, 80, 83 “Un-American”, 33, 105, 116, 174 Underground railroad, 131 United Kingdom (UK), 5, 10, 16, 26, 35, 59, 61, 65–67, 74–76, 79, 107, 139 United Nations, 173 United States Information Agency, 32 United States (US), 5, 11, 15, 35, 39, 42, 46, 52, 53, 55, 59, 65–69, 73, 76, 105, 107, 114, 122, 127, 128, 130, 131, 134, 135, 138, 150, 173–176, 179

V Variety, 52 VH1, 114 Vietnam, 41, 131, 174 Visual Editions, 128 Vogue Magazine, 130 Vonnegut, Kurt, 175

W Wakabayashi, Daisuke, 176 Wallington, 90 Wall Street, 117, 128 Walt Disney, 28, 117 Warhol, Andy, 119 Wark, McKenzie, 126 Warner Brothers, 53

188

INDEX

Warren, Marcus, 67, 69, 74, 76 Wasserstrom, Jeffrey, 11 Weldon, Fay, 41 Wells, H.G., 22, 32, 84, 85 Wenchang, 176 West, Franz, 119 Wheatcroft, Geoffrey, 7 Wheatley, Dennis, 136 White Street, 1 Why Orwell Matters/Orwell’s Victory, 2, 16, 59, 104, 107 Wilford, Hugh, 8 Williams, Ian, 11 Williams, Raymond, 37, 106 Wilson, Edmund, 35 Winston Smith, 55 Wollaeger, Mark, 8, 9, 53 Woodcock, George, 108

Woodhouse, Christopher Montague “Monty”, 52 World War II, 15, 32, 37, 65, 86, 105, 108, 134, 136, 148, 173 X Xbox, 137 Xiao, Muyi, 176 Y Yang, Zeyi, 176 Young, Cathy, 65, 140, 151 Youtube, 58 Z Zamyatin, Eugene, 85–89, 101 Zionism, 56