Preface of Animal Farm by Russell Baker We were very lucky to get out of Spain alive, George Orwell wrote

afterwards. He was not talking about the nearly fatal throat wound he suffered in combat during the Spanish Civil War but about Stalins murderous political apparatchiks who had gained partial control of the Spanish government by 1937. He had gone to Spain to fight for that government because he thought it represented political decency, and his belief in the importance of political decency had nearly been the end of him. More or less by chance, he had ended in a Trotskyist outfit at a time when Stalinists were trying to destroy every trace of Trotskys contributions to the Russian revolution. These purges were directed from Moscow, but had deadly consequences even in faraway Spain, where Stalin was ostensibly supporting a democratic Spanish government. Many of our friends were shot, and others spend a long time in prison or simply disappeared, Orwell recalled in his preface to a 1947 Ukrainian-language edition of Animal Farm. This narrow escape from the long reach of Moscow-style politics left him alarmed about the gullibility of other well-meaning, decent people in Western Europe. He thought too many decent people in the Western democracies had succumbed to a dangerously romantic view of the Russian revolution that blinded them to Soviet reality. Soviet communism paid a heavy price for what it did to Orwell in Spain. Out of that experience came Animal Farm. An attack on the myth of the nobility of Soviet communism, Animal Farm became one of the centurys most devastating literary acts of political destruction. Orwell called the book a fairy story. Like Voltaires Candide, however, with which it bears comparison, it is too many other things to be so handily classified. It is also a political tract, a satire on human folly, a loud hee-haw at all who yearn for Utopia, an allegorical lesson, and a pretty good fable in the Aesop tradition. It is also a passionate sermon against the dangers of political innocence. The passage in which the loyal but stupid workhorse Boxer is sold to be turned into glue, hides, and bone meal because he is no longer useful is written out of a controlled and icy hatred for the cynicism of the Soviet systembut also out of despair for all deluded people who served it gladly. Maybe because it gilds the philosophic pill with fairy-story trappings, Animal Farm has had an astonishing success for a book rooted in politics. Since its first publication at the end of World War II, it has been read by millions. With 1984, published three years later, it established Orwell as an important man of letters. It has enriched modern political discourse with the observation that All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than other. How did we ever grasp the true nature of the politics of the uplift before Orwell explained it so precisely? George Orwell is the pen name of Eric Blair, the son of a colonial official with long service in British India. Eric was educated as a scholarship boy at Eton and seemed to be miserable there most of the time, largely, one guesses, because of the money gap that divided him from so many of his well-heeled schoolmates. His dislike of the moneyed classes in turn influenced him toward a lifelong loyalty to democratic socialism. After Eton he went to Burma as a member of the Imperial constabulary and had the enlightening experience of discovering he was hated by the Burmese people as a symbol of British imperialism. Hating the work himself, he quit, and came back to England to try making a living by writing. During the years when he was not very successful he began to devote himself to work for British socialism. Afterwards he said he had never written anything good that was not about politics. Before he went to work on Animal Farm his books were well enough received by the critics but sold modestly. Those old enough to remember the wartime spirit of the 1940s may be startled to realize that Orwell started work on Animal Farm in 1943. As he discovered when he went looking for a publisher, Stalins Soviet Union was so popular that year in Britain and America that few wanted to hear or read anything critical of it. It was as though a great deal of the West had willingly put on blinders, and this was because the Red Army that year had fought the

Nazis to a standstill and forced it to retreat. Suddenly Hitlers army, which had looked invincible for so long, had begun to look vincible. In this period the air on both sides of the Atlantic was filled with a great deal of justifiable praise for the Soviet people and their fighting forces. Stalins political system, with its bloody purges and police-state brutality, was an important beneficiary of all this. Looking for a publisher for his small book, Orwell was reminded that British socialists, who idealized the Russian revolution, had never been hospitable to critics of the Soviet Union. In 1943, however, even conservatives were pro-Soviet. It became hard to write candidly of the Soviet system without being accused of playing dupe to the Nazis. Orwell discovered how hard when he began receiving publishers rejections on Animal Farm. With its swinish communists, the book seemed heretical. And no wonder. Stalin and Trotsky, after all, were unmistakably Orwells feuding pigs, Napoleon and Snowball. It was not until the war had ended that Fredric Warburg finally published it, on August 17, 1945. It brought Orwell his first popular success, with sales in England vastly exceeding any of his previous books. In America, where it was published in 1946, it sold nearly 600,000 copies in four year and has not stopped selling since. Whats curious was Orwells insistence that he had no intention of damaging the socialist cause. You would never have guessed this after reading the book, but he insisted that he intended only to write a cautionary story for the democratic West, warning it against a dangerously alien form of socialism. Devoted to British socialism, Orwell cannot have found it very pleasant being denounced an enemy of what the Russians, and many of his countrymen too, called socialism. Orwell, of course, was seldom happier than when he was attacking fraud and hypocrisy and hearing the squeals of the injured. Despite his insistence on being political in his work, Orwells career suggest his politics were the sort that real politicians detest. Why, for example, was Orwell so determined to make the case against Soviet communism at precisely the moment all proper people preferred not to hear it? Devoted socialist he may have been, but he had none of the politicians instinct for trimming sails to the wind when it is expedient to tell people what they want to hear. Worse, he insisted on telling people precisely what they did not want to hear. He was that political figure all politicians fear: the moralist who cannot bear to let any wrong deed go undenounced. As a politician he had the fatal defect of the totally honest man; He insisted on the truth even when the truth was most inconvenient. There is an aloneness about Orwell, an insistence on being his own man, on not playing along with the team as the loyal politician is so often expected to do, or else. This is brilliantly illustrated in his classic essay Politics and English Language,: showing how politicians twist the language to distort and deceive. This amounts to an act of treason within the political trade. The man is trying to make it harder for a politician to fool enough of the people enough of the time to gain power. Orwell seemed more candid than usual about Animal Farm when he wrote the preface for its Ukrainian edition, and it read very much like an anti-Soviet tract. The communist manhunts in Spain, which he had narrowly escaped, coincided with the Moscow purges, he wrote, and taught me how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries. After seeing innocent people imprisoned because they were suspected of unorthodoxy, he was appalled on returning to England to find numerous sensible and well-informed observers believing the most fantastic accounts of conspiracy, treachery and sabotage alleged in the Moscow purge trials. And so I understood, more clearly than ever, the negative influence of the Soviet myth upon the western socialist movement it was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was. Since 1930 I had seen little evidence that the U.S.S.R. was progressing toward anything that

once could truly call socialism. To the contrary , it was becoming a hierarchical society, in which the rulers have no more reason t o give up their power than any other ruling class. Since 1937, the year he fled Spain for his life, he had been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialism movement. Here he was conceding that Animal Farm was meant to help destroy the Soviet myth. In the late 1940s several books were published that heavily influenced intellectual attitudes about the future of totalitarianism. All were bleak, written, it seemed, from a deep conviction that the totalitarian state would develop such formidable powers in the future that humans would become helpless to preserve their identity. Orwell, with Animal Farm and 1984, and Arthur Koestler, with Darkness at Noon, were read on campuses everywhere and so spread a mood of pessimism, which was probably responsible for a great deal of the intellectual communitys enthusiasm for the cold war. Aldous Huxleys utopian Brave New World, with it portrait of a heavily drugged society easily manipulated by politicians, also had considerable vogue in this era. What all had in common was a depressing pessimism about the future. Like so much other writing of the era, they rested on the assumption that individuals were no match for the efficient new technology at the disposal of totalitarian politicians. Rubashov in Darkness at Noon is as powerless against the inhumane force of New Soviet Man Gletkin as Winston Smith in 1984 is powerless to prevail over the incredible police efficiency of Big Brother. In the future worlds envisioned in this literature, inhumanity has triumphed over mankinds pathetic little attempts to stand up against totalitarian efficiency. Animal Farm ends on a slightly less hopeless note, but only slightly. Well, here we are in that future that so many writers fifty years ago could only guess at, and what do we see? They are ludicrously wrong about the amazing efficiency with which totalitarians would destroy individualism. Why did they get it al wrong? For one thing, they were men who had come to maturity in the age of the dictators. Hitler had terrified their generation with a glimpse of what inhuman tyrants could do with the modern technology at the states disposal. The war with Hitler had been a close thing, won perhaps only because Hitler himself had conducted it with such human stupidity. The pessimists failed to allow for the stupidity and incompetence factor among people who would run the totalitarian states. There was little cause for joy in the result of the Hitler war: a vast increase in Stalins dictatorial power. The fantastic new technology seemed to provide the malevolent state with devices that would make it easy to enslave the individual. In 1984 television makes it possible for Big Brother to watch everybody all the time. Huxleys Brave New World hints at the power of drugs to keep people permanently pacified. What was unpredictable was the liberating effect of technology. The Soviet Union could surround itself with walls but could not block out revolutionary radio and electronic waves, which stirred up the supposedly whipped human herd with an irresistible appetite for rock n roll, blue jeans and other such subverters of totalitarian rule. Finally, the fearful efficiency of the totalitarian state turned out to be an absurd myth. As someone finally pointed out, making a simple telephone call in Moscow could sometimes take hours, if not days. None of this is to say that Orwell and his fellow pessimists of the 1940s ought not to be read with the greatest respect. They should be. They show us the edge of terror on which we lived fifty hears ago and help u understand why that generation was willing to spend so much treasure and take such daring risks to keep totalitarianism at bay. And in Animal Farm Orwell left us a lesson about the human contribution to Political terror that will always be as up-to-date as next years election.

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Introduction of Animal Farm by C. M. Woodhouse

In the sixth volume of The Second World War, Sir Winston Churchill has described the scene at Potsdam in July, 1945, when from a little distance he watched President Truman tell Marshal Stalin of the great event that was taking place in the following month; the latest triumph of Western genius, the masterpiece that was destined so profoundly to affect the history of the world. The Marshal showed polite interest, the mildest of curiosity that barely rose above the level of indifference, and no comprehension whatever. Sir Winston was sure, he tells us, That he had no idea of the significance of what he was being toldIf he had the slightest idea of the revolution in world affairs which was in progress his reactions would have been obviousBut his face remained gay and genial

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According to President Truman, he did not even ask a single question. What Marshal Stalin was being told about was not, though as a matter of mere chronological chance it could have been, the imminent publication of a little book called Animal Farm, which appeared on the bookstalls in the same month in which the atomic bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No doubt the Marshals reaction would have been much the same if it had ben; and perhapsthrough this is still a very much longer shothis reaction would have been just as inappropriate. It was nothing but an arbitrary coincidence that brought these two events together in August, 1945, though they took almost equally long to prepare: George Orwells whole life was spent in preparation of Animal Farm, and the text itself bears the dates November, 1943February, 1944, months when the Manhattan project was also moving towards a climax. But it was a coincidence that must have given Orwell a sad, ironic satisfaction: for there are those who have argued that, looked at in a wider historical context, the first atomic bombs were aimed at a quite different political target which had noting to do with the Japanese war; and there are others who have convinced themselves that Animal Farm was also aimed at a political targetthe same one. Orwell himself might perhaps have admitted to agreeing with both interpretations; but he would also surely have argued that this personal enemy was no single individual or governmentit was the system of the world capable of producing and using atomic bombs. In this case the coincidence of August, 1945, was even more remarkable. Disciples of Professor Toynebee yet unborn may well point to it as on of historys most striking conjunctions of challenge and response.

These are the early days to claim that the pen is mightier than the atomic bomb; but Orwell would not have flinched from the confrontation. It is not much more than one hundred years since Bulwer Lytton discovered for us that the pen in mightier than the sword, already then an obsolescent weapon, and even that only

Beneath the rule of men entirely great,

a sufficiently rare state of affairs. In the last hundred years enough has happened to justify us in believing that the pens response to the challenge of force is at east not ludicrous and hopeless; indeed, it is perhaps the one serious hope we have. Certainly it would not have seemed ludicrous to Sir Winston Churchill to have spoken in the context of 1945 of a book instead of a bomb, for the pen has always been the first weapon in his armoury; and with it he won the most crucial victory in the history of our race, in the battle that was joined with words: We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be Sir Winston had the advantage, it is true (though it is also true that he furnished that advantage himself), of proving Bulwers epigram in the exact conditions required by Bulwers qualifying line. George Orwell had come to doubt before he died (at any rate, when he wrote 1984) whether those conditions would ever be seen on earth again. But there is no doubt whatever that it was a purpose of the same kind that Orwell was setting himself to achieve by his wring s, and especially when he wrote Animal Farm. If the book itself had left any doubt of the matter, Orwell dispelled it in an article which he called Why I Write a few years later:

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianismAnimal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole. In the criticisms of some of his contemporaries which Orwell wrote even earlier than Animal Farm, his recurrent theme was their failure to protest against the world they lived in. This is the whole burden of his longest and most serious piece of literary criticism, written in 1940 on Henry Miller; and he called it Inside the Whale to illustrate this same point that Miller had failed in his duty to protest, had performed the essential Jonah act of allowing himself to be swallowed, remaining passive, accepting. In the same essay he criticized a line of Mr. Audens poem Spain.

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The Conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder,

With the comment that: it could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It is odd, then, to find that in Animal Farm he does speak just so lightly of murder; that in fact he places on record a score of murders without a measurable flicker of emotion in excess of Mr. Audens. It is odder still, at first sight, to find Animal Farm subtitled A Fairy Story, for we are accustomed to think of the fairy-story as the escapist form of literature par excellence.

In what sense can Animal Farm properly be called a fairy-story? It tells how the animals captured the Manor Farm from its drunken incompetent farmer; how they changed its name to Animal Farm and established it as a model community in which all animals were equal; how two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, gained control fo the revolution and fought each other from the mastery; how the neighbouring humans reacted and counter-attacked and were beaten off; how Napoleon ousted Snowball and declared him a traitor; how economic necessity compelled the animals to compromise with the human system; how Napoleon negotiated an alliance with the human enemy and exploited it to establish his personal dictatorship; how the farm learned that some animals are more equal than others: and their last state was as bad as their first; and how the ruling pigs became daily more and more indistinguishable from their human neighbours. There is little here at first sight that we associate with the fairy-story; there is no element of magic, once the initial convention of zoomorphism is accepted; there is no happy ending, except one for the villains; there is no Prince Charming or maiden in distress or sentimental interest of any kind, beyond the personal tragedy of the cart-horse Boxer and the frivolous vanity of the white mare Mollie. The fairy-story is an elastic categoryAndrew Lang included A Voyage to Lilliput in the very first of his coloured fairybooks; and certainly not all the conventional ingredients are essential to a fairy-story. Yet it would be natural to suppose that at least some of them ought to be found there; and at first sight it is tempting to conclude that Orwell wrote his subtitle with his tongue in his cheek, and to read Animal Farm with our tongues in ours. And then it is impossible to understand why the book has had such a world-wide appeal to human sentiment in the past nine years, for books written in a mere spirit of teasing do not.

In fact Orwell was a deep lover of words who never consciously misused them. If he said he had written a fairystory with a political purpose, we cannot lightly suppose he spoke lightly. A political purpose suggests some kind moral, and that suggests rather the fable, the medium of Aesop or La Fontaine or even Thurber. There have been fairy-stories purporting to have morals before now; Rimsky-Korsakov called Le Coq dOr a fairy-tale with a moral, though no one except possibly the Russian Imperial Censor (who objected to the original version of the opera as subversive) has ever been able to detect what it was. There is something freakish about the idea, anyway, which makes it seem unlikely to stir the emotions of the common reader; and it is impossible to attach a moral to any familiar sense to Animal Farm, where wickedness ends in triumph and virtue is utterly crushed. There is perhaps a moral for farmers: dont take to drink and let your animals get out of hand; but even so the villains will be comforted to find that everything comes out all right for them in the end. For the downtrodden animals there is nothing but misery, cruelty, and injustice; and in place of a moral there is only the tragic chorus of the donkey Benjamin, who held that life would go on as it had always gone onthat is, badly. This is not like the kind of moral that tells us to look before we leap or not to count our boobies before they are hatched. For the animals never had a chance to choose, and if they had it would have made not difference.

It is just this sense of purposeless cruelty, though, that gives the clue to Orwells purpose, as well as to his deadly serious reason for calling Animal Farm a fairy-story. The point about fairy-stories is that they are written not merely without a moral but without a morality. They take place in a world beyond good and evil, where people (or animals) suffer or prosper for reasons unconnected with ethical meritfor being ugly or beautiful respectively, for instance, or for even more unsatisfactory reasons. A little girl sets out to do a good deed for her grandmother and gets gobbled up by a wolf; a young rogue escapes the gallows (and gets an old Jew hanged instead) by his talent on the fiddle; dozens of young princes die horrible deaths trying to get through the thorn-hedge that surrounds the Sleeping Beauty, just because they had the bad luck to be born before her hundred-year curse expired; and one young prince, no better or worse, no handsomer or uglier than the rest gets through merely because he has the good luck to arrive just as the hundred years are up and so on and so on. Even when Grimms stepmothers are called wicked, it is well remembered that in German their Bosheit is viciousness and bad temper, not moral guilt. For all this is related by the fairy-story tellers without approval or disapproval, without a glimmer of subjective feeling, as though their pens were dipped in surgical spirit to sterilize the microbes of emotion. They never seek to criticize or moralize, to protest or plead or persuade; and if they have an emotional impact on the reader, as the greatest of them do, that is not intrinsic to the stories. They would indeed only weaken that impact in direct proportion as soon as they set out to achieve it. They move by not seeking to move; almost, it seems, by seeking not to move. The fairy-story that succeeds is in fact not a work of fiction at all; or at least no more so than, say, the opening chapters of Genesis. It is a transcription of a view of life into terms of highly simplified symbols; and when it succeeds in its literary purpose, it leaves us with a deep indefinable feeling of truth; and it it succeeds also, as Orwell set out to do, in a political as as an artistic purpose, it leaves us also with a feeling o rebelliousness against the truth revealed. It does so not by adjuring us to rebel, but by the barest economy of plain description that language can liberate appeal to the emotions, it uses for characters not rounded, three-dimensional human beings that develop psychologically through time, but fixed stereotypes, puppets, silhouettesor animals. (A specially good instance is The Adventures of Pinocchio: for Pinocchio was in fact a wooden puppet; and when at last, by acquiring a heart and a conscience, he became a little boy instead, at that exact point, with a sure instinct, Collodi brought the hole matter to a full-stop, since he was writing a fairy-tale and not a didactic childrens romance.) In these respects Animal Farm is after all correctly labeled a fairy-story. Its message (which is by no means a moral) is that of all the great fairy-stories: Life is like thattake it or leave it. And because it is written by a poet, our reaction is like that of another poet, Edna St. Vincent Millay, to another (not so very different) situation:

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I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

To argue thus is to class Orwell among the poets; and that is not absurd. It happens that when he wrote in verse, the results were not particularly distinguished. The song in Animal Farm, Beasts of England, is not a fair example, since it was no more intended to be poetry than God Save the Queen: it is in fact a happy example of what Professor Collingwood, in his aesthetic theory, used to call magic art. But there are a few examples in Orwells other works (in the posthumous collection of essays, England Your England, for example) which do purport to be poetry, and as such fail. Orwell was a poet who happened to find his medium in prose; a poet not so much in his means of expression as in the nature of his vision, which could strip the sprawling tangle of the world around him down to its core with the simplicity of a timeless flash of intuition (the sort of intuition enjoyed by Dionysiacs, according to Plato, or by epileptics, according to Dostoevsky, or by devotees of mescalin according to Mr. Aldous Huxley); and which then turned deliberately to the most ascetically plain tools of expression to communicate it. He was the kind of prose-writer whom poets accepted as one of themselves, as Shelley accepted Herodotus, Plato, Livy, Plutarch, Bacon, and Rousseau among the poets he was defending in A Defence of Poetry. And Shelley, who may be supposed to have known his business, would surely have been glad to accept a writer who so confidently supported, and strove so stubbornly to substantiate, his own claim that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Is the claim justified of Orwell? Clearly, not yet; and even for the future, only by offering precarious hostages to fortune. But everything has been a bit precarious since August, 1945, when Animal Farm and its formidable twin first saw the light of day together. Which of the two has so far made the biggest impressionthere is no blinding or deafening ourselves to that; but Orwells still, small voice has also made itself continuously heard in its own quiet,

persistent, almost nagging way. Already there have been momentary intervals in the nuclear uproar of the midtwentieth century when its steady, reassuring murmur has come through. Already in a score of countries and a dozen languages Animal Farm has made its peculiar mark in translation and in strip cartoon (one of the most appropriate of modern vehicles for fairy-story); and the political flavour of its message at least, whether rightly or wrongly particularized, has not been lost in the transcription. Already Orwell has launched the long haul of wresting back some of those cardinal, once meaningful, words like equality, peace, democracy, which have been fraudulently converted into shibboleths of political warfare; and already it is impossible for anyone who has read Animal Farm (as well as for many who have not) to listen to the demagogues claptrap about equality without also hearing the still, small voice that adds: but some are more equal than others.

There is a long way to go yet; but there is a long time ahead, too. Animal Farm will not, like Uncle Toms Cabin, contribute to changing history within a decade or so. But it probably has as good a chance as any contemporary work of winning its author a placeunacknowledged, of courseamong Shelleys legislators of the world. And even if the chance does not come off, Orwell has, anyway, two strings to his bow: he is the author of 1984 as well as of Animal Farm. If the worst comes to the worst and he fails as a legislator he is then virtually certain of immortality as a prophet.

C. M. Woodhouse The Times Literary Supplement, London, August 6, 1954