ORWELL’S HEALTH KEPT HIM from getting on too quickly with the work he so desperately wanted to do. In early March 1938, he began bleeding from the left lung. Evidently he’d had a mild case of tuberculosis when younger, and one of the lesions left by the disease was acting up. Orwell found himself committed to a sanatorium, along with other lung patients seeking a clean climate and fresh air for their health. The only activity he was permitted was an occasional afternoon of fishing; his doctors forbade the use of a typewriter or even pen and paper for more than a few hours a week. He was able only to write book reviews, but he took his confinement as an opportunity to consider the format of his next book. He’d written two nonfiction works and was ready to return to the novel, but he wanted his new novel to carry greater political content than his previous one. The introspection of Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying must be replaced by something larger, more reflective of his own enlarged consciousness.
Homage to Catalonia was published by Secker and Warburg late in April, while its author remained on his back in a hospital bed. Any apprehensions Orwell may have felt about having so controversial a book published while he was too ill to respond to criticisms quickly evaporated. It became clear soon after publication that Homage to Catalonia was going to be denied a great deal of attention. Seeker and Warburg believed in the value of the book, but they also knew the effect that a large controversy would have on sales: people flocked to purchase controversial books. Attacks from the left would only boost the success of Homage to Catalonia.
The controversy failed to materialize. The left was more dismissive of the book, at least in print, than publicly angered by it. Many of the reviews took the tone of steering readers away from a book about the United Marxist Workers’ Party (POUM), the Trotskyites who were enemies of the Spanish left. Orwell’s prose received favorable notice but his politics were sneered at. The communists had revealed the complicity of the POUM, and any apologia for the traitors would find little welcome among the left-wing reviewers in Britain. They knew the truth because they had read it in the communist and left-wing papers. Orwell responded to one column which had charged that the POUM was directly under the control of Franco, but other than that there was little for him to do. Seeker and War burg printed a first edition of 1,500 copies; it proved far more than were needed to meet the demand. It would be fifteen years before an American edition appeared. It was a reaction to which Orwell was accustomed: one more of his works was being ignored.
In the sanatorium Orwell made notes for his new novel, worked at an idea for an antiwar pamphlet, gave thought to politics and his own political ideas. Eileen could make the trip to visit him only twice a month, having to spend most of her time in Wallington minding The Stores. Orwell got along well with the other patients, mostly ex-servicemen, and divided his time between conversations with them and solitary stints either fishing or in his room. He followed the news of the Spanish Civil War, reading the reports of the increased German and Italian presence in the conflict, watching the reports carefully as the fascists unleashed the power of modern mechanized air warfare. War, with bombs raining on the British countryside, could not be far off now. Orwell, for his part, joined the ILP officially, taking a stand with his membership as he had with his typewriter.
By August he had recuperated sufficiently for his doctors to begin discussing discharge. They recommended strongly that he and Eileen go to a warm climate for the winter, but money, as always for Orwell, remained a problem. The failure of Homage to Catalonia to sell had been a serious setback, and the income from reviews was a mere trickle. The Stores generated more expenses than it did income, despite Eileen’s careful management of the shop. Orwell cut back on his smoking, steeling himself for another English winter. L. H. Myers, a novelist who had enjoyed some success with a quartet of novels about India, learned of Orwell’s plight. An admirer of Orwell’s work, Myers put up £300, anonymously, to finance a season in Morocco for Orwell and Eileen.
They arrived in Marrakesh in September 1938, and stayed in a hotel until they found a small villa they could afford. Typically for Orwell, his first acts upon settling into the new home were to obtain a few small animals—chickens and a goat—and some vegetable seeds. He might by his health be exiled from The Stores, but he would not give up his gardening. As always he and Eileen gave names to the animals, making up little stories about them from time to time.
Orwell also struck up a correspondence with ILP members he knew who could provide him with special knowledge about the insurance industry and the life of insurance salesmen. He was beginning to develop the characterization of his new novel’s protagonist. He would make the character, George Dowling, an insurance salesman, a man whose products were purchased by people fearful of the future, and whose employers generated profits by being statistically optimistic about the future. Dowling, as he began to come to life on the page, was caught somewhere between optimism and pessimism, a man of middle years who takes a journey back to the cherished spots of his youth only to find them destroyed by urban sprawl and technological progress. Orwell called the novel Coming Up for Air. He completed the first draft before New Year 1939.
As Orwell revised his novel in the opening months of the new year, Dowling’s fears about the future, about bombed-out London streets, about the spread of sloganeering and official control of society, were mirrored in Spain. Barcelona fell on January 26, 1939, and by late March Madrid had fallen. The opening battle of the war had ended in a fascist victory. But Coming Up for Air had, beneath its surface of grime and pollution and political fear, a current of optimism, just as in the novel cleaner currents would flow through the polluted streams that so depressed Dowling. The middle class, Orwell said with this novel, the decent and ordinary men and women of Britain had it within them to effect the changes that were required to make the world livable once more. By April Orwell and Eileen were back home from Morocco and the new novel had been delivered to Gollancz. At the same time, German troops were marching into Czechoslovakia, with Hitler announcing to the world that they had been invited in by the Czech government.
As Gollancz readied Coming Up for Air for the printers, Orwell returned to The Stores and set to work clearing the garden. He did not feel up to another novel immediately, and instead turned his attention to the compilation of a book of essays. Late in June he traveled to Southwold on a summons from his family: Richard Blair had cancer and the end was near. Orwell’s father died on June 28, 1939, with his son sitting nearby. The long life of the opium officer who so believed in empire had ended. His son’s latest novel had sold more than 2,000 copies that month, its first in print. Orwell returned to The Stores after the funeral. His relationship with his father had never been close, but the two had loved each other. Orwell missed Richard Blair’s solidity.
Coming Up for Air began with brisk sales, requiring an almost immediate second printing, but soon slowed. Orwell concentrated upon his collection of essays and a variety of antiwar writings. He wanted to make clear that unless the coming war was fought as an antiimperialist war, a war not only against the imperialism as practiced by the fascists but also against Britain and France’s own imperialist tendencies, it would not be worth fighting. He passed his time writing and raising flowers, formulating his antiwar ideas. The arguments he constructed that summer collapsed in August when, in a stunning surprise, Stalin and Hitler announced a nonaggression treaty. Within weeks Soviet troops were fighting alongside Nazis in the subjugation of Poland. The communist press, of course, defended the pact, and with those words sought to create their own reality. Many of Orwell’s friends resigned from the communist party, but many ILP members remained willing to argue that the coming war was a war against capitalism solely, that communism was still acceptable. Orwell left the ILP. On September 3, 1939, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Orwell began rethinking his arguments.
He would not surrender his opposition to capitalism and his hatred of empire. Capitalism and imperialism were at the root of the conflict that was erupting. But Britain, whose empire spanned the world and whose economy was capitalist, was also a democracy, populated by people not unlike George Dowling of Coming Up for Air or George Orwell, its author. Their decency could be appealed to, even as their patriotism and detestation of totalitarianism led them to join the effort against the Axis. Orwell was ready to do his bit, but had first to determine what that bit would be.
Eileen found her path more quickly than did her husband. Before the war was a month old she had left The Stores and moved to London, finding a job with, ironically, the government’s Censorship Department. Orwell remained at the cottage, tending the animals and the garden, selling candy to children, and completing his book of essays. He finished the manuscript by the end of the year, calling the book Inside the Whale after one of the essays it contained. They were literary essays mainly, but they were political as well. “Inside the Whale” itself began as a discussion of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer but built into a long rumination on the political nature underlying modern literature. A piece on “Boys’ Weeklies” examined the pulp stories he recalled so fondly from his youth, and at the same time examined themes, political and social, that ran throughout popular literature. His mastery of the essay form was complete, and he allowed his pieces now to find their own length as he worked his way through his arguments.
Orwell was attempting to find work of another sort, busily writing letters seeking some sort of job where he could help the war effort. He was not quite sure what he wanted to do, or what could be done with him. For a time he thought that his fondness for fiddling with equipment might lead him into mechanical draftsmanship, but nothing came of that. His health kept him from working in one of the ministries. Orwell thought that his writings were an aid to the war effort, at least an aid in presenting a divergent point of view to those who read his books, but readership remained small. Gollancz had felt Inside the Whale’s prospects sufficiently poor to offer only a £20 advance. During wartime it seemed unlikely that people would come out in great numbers for a volume of essays, no matter how masterful, that revealed the hidden political nature of works such as those of Dickens. The book met Gollancz’s expectations.
By the time Inside the Whale appeared in March 1940, Orwell was preparing to leave the gentle countryside and Wallington and The Stores where he had been so happy. Although he kept the lease, he sold off his livestock and moved to London in May, joining Eileen in a dreary small apartment. His work was dreary as well. While Orwell wanted to undertake a truly ambitious novel, one that might span several generations and several volumes, he found himself reviewing plays and movies for Time and Tide, an undistinguished journal that had no real political force or stance. Orwell loathed the work, but he and Eileen needed even the small amount that his reviews brought in. He did no work on the novel. On several occasions he attempted to enlist in the Army, but he continued to be turned down. He joined the Home Guard, a militia formed for the defense of Britain, and became a sergeant of “C” Company of the County of London’s Fifth Home Guard Battalion. Orwell realized that the Soviet Union could not arm its private citizens, nor could any totalitarian state: the risk of armed revolt was too great. In Britain the common people took their arms and their domestic defense responsibilities seriously, and unified their purpose with that expressed by the government: the nation must be defended, the fascists defeated. Orwell encouraged other socialists to join the Home Guard, not to spark revolution, but to stand as good common people alongside other good common people, to demonstrate that socialists were not to be feared, and that revolutionaries could be as patriotic as the next person.
Patriotism was much on his mind. Orwell approached the nature of patriotism and its relation to his own political ideas from several directions. In an article called “Wells, Hitler and the World State” he acknowledged the great influence of H. G. Wells’s ideas and works on himself and his generation. But, he argued, Wells had lost touch with reality, and become too caught up in the idea of a World State with one unified government. Patriotism, Orwell said, got in the way of such a government coming about. Wells failed to take simple, common patriotism into account and that was why his books remained structures simply of ideas and had no significant effect upon society.
Orwell spoke of the great attraction of military precision, and he was attracted to it himself, priding himself upon the discipline he brought to his Company “C” responsibilities. He did not forget his socialism, and constantly made the point that an armed working class was a great symbol of democracy. At the same time, he made notes for a project about urban warfare, whether for defense against invasion or revolt against oppression. Toward the end of summer he undertook one of the longest essays of his career, The Lion and the Unicorn. The essay was to serve as the first pamphlet in a series called The Searchlight Books, to be published by Secker and Warburg. Orwell played a part in the development of the books, serving as one of the series’ editors. Authors were to be given complete freedom in their choice of a subject and the approach they took to it. The series was intended to aid the war effort and also to recommend or advocate reforms that would improve the postwar world.
Orwell wrote The Lion and the Unicorn in just a few months, but he had spent years considering its subject. He wrote of the British people, their peculiar natures, their eccentricities, and the ability of adversity to change eccentricity into virtue. In times of crisis all British people pulled as one. Their patriotism lay beneath the surface, a private matter, until threatened. Patriotism, Orwell had come to realize, could form the core of a workable socialism. In Germany, in all of the totalitarian countries, patriotism had been poisoned, but in Britain it could not be. British patriotism could not be roused by cries for conquest: only by the need for defense. The British had acquired an empire more than they had conquered one, and its acquisition had been by virtue of a navy rather than a large army. The government’s request for Home Guard volunteers brought more than two hundred and fifty thousand volunteers the first day, but in peacetime Britain had trouble keeping even a small army. England’s immunity rested upon a commonsense decency.
Orwell’s insight and prose were up to the ambition of the essay. Everything came together at his typewriter as he smoked cigarette after cigarette, rolling the rough tobacco in a little machine. “A military parade,” he wrote, “is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face.” He captured totalitarianism by chilling his readers, then thawing them with his common sense. “Why is the goose-step not used in England? . . . It is not used because the people in the street would laugh.” The pamphlet was a masterpiece of polemical writing, frightening and witty, criticizing and advocating, visionary and yet sound. Orwell envisioned a planned Britain, a socialist Britain, a more equitable Britain, but a land that remained British. The common people, seeing the success of industrial planning during the war, would welcome such economic strategies in peacetime—if the socialists could put their case well enough during the war.
Orwell liked his vision of Britain: he was creating a world in which he would enjoy living, a socialist state where he could still be George Orwell, free to write. But the real Britain of late 1940 could not be forgotten as he built his little book. The Germans were busy trying to destroy London. Orwell and Eileen could only rarely get out of London and to The Stores. Orwell missed his garden. London during the blitz (as the German bombardment was known) was a place of shortages, of blackouts, of sudden siren shrieks announcing the arrival of another flight of German bombers, the wait for the solid blast of the bombs that often fell nearby. But it was also a unified city, evidence in fact of the conclusions in Orwell’s pamphlet. As 1941 neared the blitz intensified, but so did British effort and unity. Siege by air was accepted as a fact of life: Orwell could step calmly into a doorway to avoid an explosion’s debris, then step calmly out and continue on his way. In bed at night he and Eileen could hear windows shatter. Orwell grew increasingly annoyed at his inability to win a job more actively involved in the war effort. He was as determined in early 1941 to serve his country as his father had been during World War I. The home guard was not enough: Orwell wanted to make a greater contribution.
His opportunity did not arrive until mid-August 1941, when he was asked to work for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Orwell would be responsible for writing and producing a variety of literary and cultural programs for BBC radio transmission to India and the Far East. Orwell joined the BBC propaganda machine somewhat warily: he had no interest in working on programs that presented the war as an effort to preserve capitalism or other aspects of a society he thought unjust and outmoded. But his objections were overcome by his subject matter. He broadcast discussions of poetry or dramatizations of short stories to intellectual audiences halfway around the globe. This activity neither preserved capitalism nor worked for socialism; it simply filled time, by the BBC’s lights, and was not truly propaganda at all. Orwell found some humor in his situation, though he was still eager to become more directly involved in the war, even as he interviewed poet T. S. Eliot on the air or wrote the scripts of news broadcasts that he turned over to Indian announcers. He did not fit in well at the BBC, where virtually every word written had to be scrutinized by the Ministry of Information lest any words slip through that would displease the government. Worse than words were ideas, and scripts were occasionally censored or rejected because of their tone. Orwell understood the Ministry’s demands and refused to bend to them. When he was asked to broadcast a new program himself, over the increasingly recognized Orwell name, he insisted that he be allowed to make clear his opposition to the government, though he restricted himself to news during his broadcasts. The microphone was emblazoned with the initials BBC, but Orwell took no official line.
He was doing a great deal of journalism as well, often writing at home late into the night after a full day at the BBC. Orwell and Eileen shared stories of the folly of censorship, of the machinations of bureaucracy, of the ease with which the truth could become lost as the government endeavored to manipulate public response. In his journalistic pieces Orwell felt more free to write of the revolution he perceived as beginning to take place in Britain. He undertook a regular letter of comment for the American left-wing journal, Partisan Review. He wrote other pamphlets and continued to review books. His BBC income allowed him to abandon the hack film and theater reviewing that he loathed and to concentrate on longer pieces. At the BBC he adapted stories by H. C. Wells and the Italian writer Ignazio Silone, but his own fiction was neglected. Orwell was also finding more prestigious markets open to him. His pieces began appearing in important journals and newspapers such as The Tribune and The Observer. The Observer became a particularly receptive home for his work, unafraid of Orwell’s idiosyncracies or the habit he had of telling the truth as he saw it, and by so doing shocking the public.
Like many Londoners during the blitz, Orwell and Eileen found themselves changing lodgings occasionally when their apartment was damaged by bombs. Eileen left censorship for a job in the Ministry of Food, where she worked on radio broadcasts dealing with nutrition and cooking. Their increasingly infrequent visits to The Stores reminded them of the war’s cost, and they both anticipated the end of the conflict when they could return to their garden full time and get back to serious work. Orwell put in his hours behind the typewriter and behind the microphone, but his frustration over the silliness, or at least the questionable value of his particular piece of the war effort grew. The British drove back Hitler’s air power, the worst of the blitz receded, and tens of thousands of Americans began to arrive as the Allies prepared for the invasion of Europe. The preparations would take years. The long, gray middle of the war was around him, and by September 1943 Orwell had had enough. He resigned from the BBC.
By the end of the year he had become literary editor of The Tribune, and agreed to do a regular column for them. The column was called “As I Please,” and its title described its subject matter. Orwell wrote of whatever caught his attention or struck his fancy; some of the columns were whimsical, others funny, others political. It was less a column of thought and idea, however, than of attitude and observation. Most of the columns appeared as they were written directly on the typewriter: he rarely took notes or outlined these pieces. Orwell relaxed even more the informal style that made his long essays so readable, and he now wrote almost conversationally. “As I Please” could be counted upon to entertain and provoke, a personal column by a private man.
He had found simultaneously a form for his political thought. Orwell had never been satisfied with the political nature of his novels. He wanted to write fiction that told a gripping story but that also had something to say, and said it in a way that any reader could understand. His adaptations of stories at the BBC had sent him again and again through the mechanics of storytelling—pace, character, structure—while the pressures upon his time prevented him from undertaking the long novel he had for so long planned. Something shorter was called for, a return to serious writing, and after leaving the BBC Orwell began toying with an idea for a parable, almost a political fairy tale. He missed The Stores and the animals to whom he and Eileen always assigned names and attributed personalities. He worried about how the farm would do without his presence, even as he understood animals’ superiority in some ways to humans. They were certainly stronger than humans, the larger animals, but they passed through life unaware of the power they possessed. Orwell began to write a story about a small English farm whose animals, aware at last of their own abilities, seize control and undertake the operation of the farm along their own lines.
Animal Farm was written quickly, despite Orwell’s other commitments. He knew his setting, the farmyard; and he knew his characters, the pigs Napoleon and Snowball, the horses Boxer and Clover, the cows, dogs, chickens, sheep, and other animals whose masses rose to take control of their collective destiny. Such a story, however complex its underlying ideas and truths, must be told in only the simplest, most transparent prose, and Orwell made his as clear as a pane of glass. Eileen played a vital part in the creation of the new book. She had always made up stories about animals, and now she helped her husband plan out his own. She loved the story from the moment it was begun, but she also teased Orwell about the reception the book would receive. She predicted that critics and intellectuals, unable to see beyond their own interests and concerns, would take the book as evidence of Orwell’s Trotskyite tendencies. For Animal Farm told the story of a revolution gone sour, losing itself in grandiose plans and ambitions at the expense of the individual. They would find Stalin’s portrait in Napoleon, the boar whose power constantly increased, and they would take Orwell apart for his story of Snowball, who after much effort and sacrifice falls from official favor on the farm. Napoleon reveals that Snowball is not the revolutionary patriot his fellow animals believed him to be. He is a traitor, he has worked for the humans. Executions ensue on an order equal to any slaughter the animals had suffered under the old system. The revolution becomes complete.
Orwell was writing of larger themes than the rise of Stalin. One of the reasons he had selected his fantastic approach was that fantasy lifted Animal Farm above mere polemic. The book was universal, not topical.
The writing showed Orwell at his best. His simple sentences and dialogue allowed him to make political points a child could understand. And the book got off to a quick start, as Major, the oldest of the pigs, addressed the assembled animals, seeking to establish the rights of animals:
“‘Comrades,’ he said, ‘here is a point that must be settled. The wild creatures, such as rats and rabbits—are they our friends or our enemies? Let us put it to the vote. I propose this question to the meeting: are rats comrades?’
“The vote was taken at once, and it was agreed by an overwhelming majority that rats were comrades. There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.”
In addition to possessing great political truths and insights, Animal Farm was a very funny book. Orwell could make people chuckle even as they read his bitter view of politics and the corruption it fosters.
No matter how clever the book was—much less that it was a great book—Animal Farm would have trouble finding a publisher. Eileen’s predictions proved accurate. Orwell was calm. When the manuscript was ready for submission in early March 1944, he wrote a letter to Gollancz predicting the publisher’s unwillingness to accept the book. Gollancz was offended by Orwell’s presumption, but read the manuscript and agreed that Orwell was correct. Seeker and Warburg, Orwell knew, would take the book, but he also knew that he had written something more than a contemporary political piece: Animal Farm possessed universal appeal as a work of literature and he wanted, if possible, for the book to be backed by a major publisher. He sent the manuscript to Jonathan Cape, who took it to the Ministry of Information for an opinion. Orwell could have predicted their response as well: complaints that the book mocked the brave Soviet allies, disapproval of the intemperateness of tone, even a suggestion that an animal less offensive than the pig be chosen for the central characters. Orwell made his response in an “As I Please” Tribune piece about publishers, writing that “Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”
His use of an animal as his metaphor was as deliberate as his choice of pigs for protagonists. The allusion, however, would be missed if he could not find a publisher. T. S. Eliot, rejecting the book for Faber and Faber, compared Orwell to Swift and made clear his recognition that Orwell had created a literary masterpiece. On the other hand, Faber could not publish the book because they did not agree with its political sympathies and sentiments. The rejections continued and Orwell began to consider publishing the book himself, even if it meant borrowing the money. By summer he had abandoned that idea and took the now ragged manuscript to Fred Warburg, who accepted it. The forthcoming contract that Warburg promised, however, met with many inexplicable delays.
Even as Animal Farm was being rejected, Orwell was making notes for a new novel. He would write a long book this time, one that would require careful planning and consideration. The effectiveness of his allegory encouraged him to try another form of fiction, the novel of a future, not of prediction but possibility. He called the book The Last Man in Europe and began building its dreary totalitarian world of permanent war, in which language, morality, and even thought are all subjugated to the control of the state. Orwell made notes and outlines.
Animal Farm was scheduled for publication in the summer of 1945—the longest wait Orwell had ever experienced for a book. Throughout the long wait he and Eileen enjoyed a most wonderful distraction. Despite the bombs bursting around them, they decided to adopt a son. As always, they were short of money, but Orwell and Eileen wanted to make their marriage complete. The child was brought to them in June 1944. They named the boy Richard Blair, after Orwell’s father, and Richard’s cries and coos mingled with the whine of the latest Nazi attempt to destroy London: V2 rocket bombs. Richard Blair, like his parents, accepted the presence of the war, a healthy, happy wartime child who became the center of his parents’ lives. They made plans. The Stores would be too small for a family. Orwell looked for a new location, a farmhouse and a bit of land, the more remote the better. Richard arrived the month the invasion of Europe was at last launched, and the war would be over within a year. Orwell was eager to isolate himself, return to the raising of animals, get down to his next book.
Before the last shot was fired, though, Orwell wanted to see the front. By March 1945 he had maneuvered his way around the medical restrictions and had won himself a position as a war correspondent. He set off for France, eager for new experience. He wrote several stories about the chaos he found in Europe, but the exertions of his trip exhausted him and his health collapsed. He thought that he would die, and composed a will with instructions regarding his literary estate, and mailed it to Eileen. He was not to hear from his wife again, though, for she was ill herself. Eileen died during what was supposed to be a routine gynecological operation on March 29, 1945. The news reached Orwell who, against the advice of physicians, left the French hospital and returned to London. He missed his wife’s funeral. Weak, coughing, greatly depressed, he went from friend to friend, sometimes weeping, more often telling the story so matter-of-factly as to seem heartless. Orwell was lost.
He returned to Europe once his health was recovered and spent some time as a journalist. He did not linger long, for Richard needed him. The war against the Germans ended and publication, at last, of Animal Farm loomed, although the book had as yet found no American publisher willing to accept Orwell’s fable. His sister Avril aided him in caring for Richard. Avril had moved to London with their mother early in the war, and both had worked for the war effort. But Ida Blair had died of a heart attack in 1943, and with Marjorie married and elsewhere, Avril felt as alone as her brother. Orwell looked for a permanent housekeeper and nanny, but also took to proposing to many of the women he met, some of them before knowing them a day. He could care for Richard himself, and he was a good and attentive father, but he wanted someone with whom to share his life. He told more than one of the women he met that it would not be a long life and his widow would have a healthy literary estate for her security.
It was odd, after all the years of small commissions and advances, to be able to make such a promise. After all the delays Warburg printed fewer than 5,000 copies of the book, but almost immediately ordered a second printing of 10,000. There remained no American publisher, but as the book’s sales mounted there seemed little doubt that eventually there would be one. The critical debate that Warburg had wanted for Homage to Catalonia erupted over Animal Farm and would not desist. Communist sympathizers resented the portrait of the noble ally that the Soviet Union, thanks to wartime propaganda, had become for much of the left. The far right, unexpectedly or at least ironically, adopted the book as a strictly anti-Stalin tract, and praised it. Some saw it as the story of Trotsky. All recognized that the book was magnificently written, and more than a few critics, even then, saw that Animal Farm was about far more than just one specific ruined revolution. Orwell, some recognized, as had T. S. Eliot, had attained the level of Jonathan Swift, whose Gulliver’s Travels was praised and damned in its day for its narrow political interests, but can still be read because its truths are universal.
Orwell’s income gave promise of rising dramatically as a result of the little book’s success, and at last he seemed to come out of his despair over Eileen’s death, at least somewhat. Not long after Animal Farm was published he hired Susan Watson, a woman of twenty-five with a child of her own, to care for Richard. He paid Susan well, and Richard responded to her affection and care. For herself Susan Watson quickly adjusted to the peculiarities of keeping house for George Orwell, the rest of the house falling to sleep to the tune of his typewriter as Orwell wrote through the night. He wrote through the days as well, occasionally going out or entertaining, but more often spending his waking time at his machine. The reputation Orwell had earned for being prolific was greatly enhanced in 1945 and 1946, as dozens of reviews and articles flooded from his typewriter. But they were all brief pieces, and though many of them were excellent, some of them masterpieces, none of them was more ambitious in scope than his wartime work. He continued to make notes for his novel, but postponed beginning it. Animal Farm was at last published in America by Harcourt Brace and was made a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club. Orwell was famous.
He remained a private man and in 1946 began preparations to move himself, Richard, and Susan Watson out of London. He’d located a farm on the island of Jura, off the west coast of Scotland, that appealed to him. The farm was at the end of a seven-mile dirt road that connected it to its closest neighbor. The entire island had fewer than three hundred inhabitants and could be reached only by ferry. There was a single church, a single doctor, and a single town, Craighouse, at the opposite end of the island from Orwell’s farm. He could not find a place more private in which to attempt a major work.