WHEN GEORGE ORWELL ARRIVED IN PARIS, he went looking for a gun. Wearing the uniform of a war correspondent, he stashed his suitcase and typewriter at the Hotel Scribe, where the other foreign reporters were based. Back on the streets he was alert and wary. How hard would it be for the NKVD to kill him? His experiences in Spain taught him how ruthless Soviet agents were in eliminating their enemies, and Trotsky’s assassination was evidence of the range of Stalin’s reach. Perhaps he was overrating his reputation with the Soviets, perhaps he was being paranoid. Nevertheless, Orwell wanted a gun and he knew just the writer to get one from: Ernest Hemingway.
This was March 1945 and the war in Europe was nearing its end. The Allies had crossed the Rhine and the Red Army was closing on Berlin. After his adventures during the liberation of Paris, Hemingway went on to cover the war in Germany. Paris, though, remained his base, and when he was in town, usually staying at the Ritz, the great and the good came to call. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were recent guests, finding Papa in high spirits; Hemingway drank Sartre into the worst hangover of his life.
Relying on these stories of Hemingway’s conviviality, and their mutual friendship of Cyril Connolly, Orwell made his way to the Ritz, looked up the famous writer in the register, and went up to room 117. He knocked on the door, Hemingway opened it. The burly American faced a tall, reed-thin Englishman with a clipped moustache. “Who are you?” he asked. “Eric Blair,” Orwell replied. “Well, what the fucking hell do you want?” asked Hemingway. “I’m George Orwell,” the visitor clarified. “Why the fucking hell didn’t you say so?” said Hemingway, reaching for the scotch. “Have a drink. Have a double. Straight or with water, there’s no soda.”1
Hemingway thought Orwell looked “very gaunt . . . in bad shape” and invited him to stay and eat. Orwell declined but asked if Hemingway might have a gun he could borrow. All Hemingway had that Orwell could conceal on his person was a .32 Colt with a short barrel. Hemingway warned his guest that if he shot someone with it “they would probably die eventually, but that there might be a long interval.” Hemingway then offered Orwell “a couple of people” to watch over him “if ‘They’ were after him.” Orwell declined, saying the gun was all he needed. Hemingway had Orwell tailed to make sure he was not being followed (his men assured him that Orwell was not being watched). So, according to Hemingway, went the only meeting between these two writers.
Once again, however, Hemingway’s memory tended to serve his personal mythology above the truth. Certainly it is strange that for such a dramatic meeting, Orwell never wrote a word about it, even in the letters he was sending home from France.2 It does look like the two writers met briefly in Paris (although whether at the Ritz or the Scribe is contested). They were both in the city in the early spring of 1945. Three years later, in a letter to Orwell’s friend Cyril Connolly, Hemingway wrote, “If you ever see Orwell, remember me to him, will you? I like him very much and it was a moment when I had no time when I met him.”3 A hurried meeting, a missed opportunity: this seems plausible enough.
Four years later, in 1952, Hemingway wrote, in a letter to Harvey Breit, that Orwell feared being “knocked off by the communists and he asked me to loan him a pistol.” Hemingway then wrote for a third time about this meeting with Orwell. In True at First Light, the “fictional memoir” published posthumously in 1999, Hemingway claimed that Orwell had come to room 117 of the Ritz “where there was still a small arsenal” from the weapons he and his partisans had collected the previous year.4 In this version, Hemingway added the detail of having Orwell followed to make sure he was safe.
Was Hemingway making this up? What complicates this theory is that there is another version of the meeting, which comes from Paul Potts, a poet Orwell met and befriended in London in 1944. Potts claimed Orwell told him of meeting Hemingway, including the detail of his initially introducing himself as Eric Blair. But in the Potts account there is no mention of a gun. What really happened that day in the Ritz (or the Scribe) is impossible to know. Hemingway’s retellings, however, do explain something about Orwell’s change in status. In 1945 Orwell was a distinguished writer and Hemingway, with his interest in the Spanish Civil War, may well have read Homage to Catalonia. He might also have recognized Orwell’s byline from the columns he wrote for Partisan Review, or, while in London before D-Day, from his reviews and essays in the British press. He was not, though, in the same league as Hemingway, who was about as famous a writer could get. That was soon to change. After the war, Hemingway’s stock declined as his work soured. Orwell, in contrast, became the iconic writer of a generation, grappling with a refigured world order divided between Western capitalism and Soviet communism. In his drink-addled braggadocio, Hemingway appears to have seduced himself into the idea that he helped out Orwell more than he may have actually done.
Yet amid the embellishment there also emerges a kernel of important truth. Orwell was afraid of the NKVD and he did want a gun. Later that year, back in London, Orwell bought a Luger from Rodney Phillips, so it is certainly credible that he was looking for a gun in Paris.5 He would soon become convinced that Communists were spying on him and going through his mail. While much of this had no basis in fact—there was no Soviet hit squad hunting him through the streets of Paris—the NKVD had only a few months previously sought to sabotage his work. As Orwell had learned in Spain, just because he was paranoid did not mean they weren’t after him.
WHEN THE SECOND WORLD WAR BEGAN, Orwell had wanted to fight. He was back in his element, energized by the conflict as he had been by the war in Spain; Connolly described him slipping into the war “as into an old tweed jacket.”6 Some on the left quailed at the idea of supporting the war, but Orwell, a critic of empire and jingoism, was clear-sighted about the threat of fascism. “The intellectuals who are at present pointing out that democracy and fascism are the same thing, depress me horribly,” he wrote to Victor Gollancz in January 1940.7 He had himself subscribed to a similar argument against intervention until the bombs started to fall. It was living in London during the Blitz that roused his inner patriot, and he sought to resolve the conflict between his patriotism and his socialism in print, firing off a volley of important essays, including “My Country Right or Left” and “The Lion and the Unicorn,” the latter published as part of a series he edited (with Tosco Fyvel, a German-born Jewish journalist who worked for British intelligence later in the war) called Searchlight Books. In these essays he made the argument that Britain needed to defeat fascism and that in order to do so, Britain needed to undergo radical political change, to cast off the nineteenth-century vestiges of imperialism and laissez-faire capitalism and embrace socialism. A united Britain could then emerge victorious from the war as a model of a socialist society that did not resort to the totalitarian methods deployed by the Soviet Union. This was a future worth fighting for.
The British Army would not let him fight, however. In the early years of the war the military were suspicious of those who had served in Spain, but in Orwell’s case there was a much more straightforward reason for rejecting him: his lungs. Orwell suffered from bronchitis as an infant and had contracted pneumonia multiple times. In 1938, he was admitted to Preston Hall sanatorium and was initially diagnosed with bronchiectasis and subsequently found to have tuberculosis. During the war, Orwell’s health improved, and a Harley Street pulmonologist told him he had nothing worse than chronic bronchiectasis.8 Still, it was not enough to get him past the Medical Board, who declared him unfit for service. Instead he enlisted as a sergeant in the Home Guard, in which he served with his publisher, Fred Warburg. He took this work seriously, drawing on his experiences in Spain to instruct his men in street-fighting, field fortifications, and the use of mortars.
In the summer of 1941 he began serving his country as a propagandist. The BBC Eastern Service made him a talks assistant with a responsibility of broadcasting material to India. He summarized news reports on the progress of the war and organized cultural programs. He secured a prestigious list of contributors, including Mulk Raj Anand, Cyril Connolly, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Stephen Spender, and Dylan Thomas, who all read from their own work. William Empson, who worked next door to Orwell at the BBC and was in charge of broadcasting to China, also contributed. This was a sociable time, despite, or perhaps because of, the bombing of London. Orwell had regular lunches with Connolly and Spender, and developed new friendships with Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge, meeting at the Bodega off the Strand. Later in the war, through a mutual friend, he got to know Graham Greene, whose writing he admired, and the two dined regularly in Soho restaurants.9
In the ferment of wartime London, Orwell’s reputation continued to grow, thanks to the reviews and essays he published in Horizon from 1940 and the regular column he wrote for Partisan Review from 1941. As an influential voice on the non-Communist left he came into the social orbit of reformist politicians and left-leaning publishers and journalists. Edward Hulton and Gerald Barry founded an informal dining club that met every Tuesday at the Shanghai restaurant in Soho, and they invited prominent intellectuals and politicians to meet and discuss the way the country should be reformed after the war. Orwell was invited to join by David Astor, who was busy shaking up his father’s paper, the Observer. William Beveridge, whose 1942 report laid the foundations of the British welfare state, was in the club, as was Stafford Cripps, the Labour politician and former ambassador to the Soviet Union who had joined Churchill’s War Cabinet on his return from Moscow in 1942. That June, when Cripps hand-picked some writers to meet with him and discuss Britain’s political future, Orwell was among them.
Drawn inevitably to these networks of influence were Soviet spies. Among the most notorious meetings of the Shanghai dining club was a furious row between Guy Burgess and the Polish journalist Isaac Deutscher (who later became famous for his biographies of Trotsky and Stalin).10 When Orwell recorded in his diary going to meet Cripps, he also noted that Burgess was in attendance; he already knew Burgess as they frequently collaborated in their work at the BBC.11 It was, though, another figure from the Shanghai dining club whom Orwell needed to watch out for. At some point that year—the date is not clear—Orwell went for lunch with Astor, Deutscher, and Peter Smollett, a high-ranking official in the Ministry of Information, running the Russian section. Before the war, Smollett was a well-connected journalist who had made his reputation by writing about the Soviet Union. He was close to Churchill’s trusted advisor, Brendan Bracken, and it is perhaps through this connection that he had secured the Ministry of Information position. He promoted Anglo-Soviet relations by organizing a series of high-profile events, including a choral performance at the Royal Albert Hall to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Red Army, complete with readings by Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. He also organized for the film USSR at War to be screened at factories around the country, with a total estimated audience of 1.25 million. He was good at his job, and Astor wanted him to be editor at the Observer.12 He also wanted Orwell to work for the newspaper. Perhaps that had been the reason for their meeting. It seems to have gone off well, and years later Smollett recalled the lunch fondly to Astor.13 Orwell would have reason to regret coming into Smollett’s orbit.
IN THE SOCIAL SCENE OF WARTIME LONDON, Orwell’s most important new friendship was the one he forged with Arthur Koestler. Both men admired each other’s work and, thanks to the match-making of Fred Warburg, they first met in February 1941, a month after Orwell had positively reviewed Darkness at Noon. Koestler had been released from Pentonville prison the previous December, and after writing Scum of the Earth, his memoir of his imprisonment in France during the Nazi occupation, had been assigned to the Aliens’ Pioneer Corps, a depository for foreigners who could not be trusted to fight. He endured basic training and was stationed in Cheltenham, spending his days digging tank traps and fake craters to deceive German bombers. He managed to evade some of this back-breaking work by giving lectures to the Army Educational Corps, but when his commanding officer—the dour Major McKay—clamped down on this, Koestler collapsed and was taken to hospital. He claimed he had had a nervous breakdown, but the medical corporal suspected he had deliberately overdosed on codeine pills.14 As Koestler convalesced he was declared unfit for service and offered a job in either military intelligence or the Ministry of Information—he chose the latter.
Free from military duty, Koestler plunged into the social life of literary London. He moved in with Connolly, who threw a big party for him, at which he met Spender, Louis MacNeice, Philip Toynbee, and John Lehmann. Another night he got drunk with Dylan Thomas, Michael Foot, and Joe Alsop. The author of Spanish Testament and Darkness at Noon was a big draw, and he always put on a performance. He was confrontational, arguing lucidly despite his thick accent, he drank heavily, and he chased women. “Like everyone who talks of ethics all day long,” Connolly later said, “one could not trust him half an hour with one’s wife, one’s best friend, one’s manuscripts or one’s wine merchant—he’d lose them all. He burns with the envious paranoiac hunger of the Central European ant-heap, he despises everybody and can’t conceal the fact when he’s drunk, yet I believe he is probably one of the most powerful forces for good in the country.”15
By day he was, like Orwell, a propagandist. Koestler spent the spring of 1942 writing anti-Nazi broadcasts for the Home Service of the BBC. He was motivated by a sense of personal urgency, and one of his priorities was to raise awareness of what was happening in the Nazi concentration camps, where he feared many family and friends were interned. He also worked on “black” propaganda for Richard Crossman in the War Office.16 While Orwell swiftly became disenchanted by propaganda work, finding it almost pointless, Koestler embraced it, drawing on his time in the Comintern for different strategies. Sensing this aptitude, Crossman invited Koestler to meet Dick White, head of MI5. This being British intelligence, it took place over a game of croquet. Also invited were Victor Rothschild, by then a senior MI5 officer, and the legal philosopher Herbert Hart. White wanted them to band together and come up with new propaganda ideas “to make Goebbels sit up.”17 Nothing came of this proposal, but Koestler became increasingly expert in cultural propaganda.
As a further sign of Koestler’s social ascent, he and Daphne Hardy were invited to move into the Kensington mansion of George Strauss, the wealthy backer of Tribune (where Orwell was literary editor). The house, close to Hyde Park, was a social hub of the Labour Party, and Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot, John Strachey, and Crossman were frequent guests. Despite working closely with Strauss, Orwell was a relatively infrequent visitor—his ascetic lifestyle was at odds with the opulence of the dinners—but on one occasion at which he was present Koestler, who had a weakness for the metaphysical, somehow persuaded him to take part in a levitation experiment. Orwell remained steadfastly on the ground. Koestler later admitted to finding Orwell intimidating, like a “real Burmah [sic] police sergeant,” so at least he had the courage to ask.18 Nevertheless, despite his friend’s capacity for excess, Orwell valued Koestler and asked him to contribute to Searchlight Books.
After years of turmoil and time spent in Spanish, French, and British prisons, Koestler should have been having the time of his life. Instead he suffered a breakdown. One of the catalysts was a meeting with the Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski, who had seen firsthand what was happening in the Belsen concentration camp. Koestler feared his mother was in Auschwitz, and many of his friends were unaccounted for, presumably in the camps. His horror at hearing the details of the slaughter was followed by outrage at the continued skepticism with which these accounts were treated by many in Britain. The suffering of those he loved left him repulsed at his own hedonism. His drinking and promiscuity were followed by self-lacerating hangovers, and his relationship with Daphne fell apart.
In the midst of what he called his “neurosis,” Koestler became fascinated by Mamaine Paget, whom he nicknamed “Mermaid.” He was not alone in his fascination. While Paget was a debutante who had been presented at court, she worked for the Ministry of Economic Warfare and preferred to mix with intellectuals and writers than high society types. Edmund Wilson, in London for The New Yorker, was smitten by her and, despite being married to Mary McCarthy, wrote a poem about her beauty that he published in The New Yorker. Wilson proposed to Paget on a subsequent visit.
Paget and her twin sister, Celia, owned the house Connolly rented, and it was through this connection that Koestler first met her in January 1944. But Koestler’s fascination with Paget turned violent. Despite his feelings for her, Koestler took Celia out to dinner and tried to sleep with her. She rejected him. The following night, Koestler took Paget out and, afterward, raped her.
“I know that I behaved in a rather swinish way,” he subsequently wrote to her. “I got you to allow me to make love to you by the usual old tricks and cunning—but I still believe that is permissible if the result is enjoyed by both. Without an element of initial rape there is no delight.”19 Despite Koestler’s horrific assault that night and his egregious attempt to rationalize it, he and Paget began an intense relationship. Koestler was locked into self-destructive behavior. When Hemingway arrived in London ahead of the D-Day landings, Connolly decided to throw a party for him. Hemingway was late and by the time he arrived, with his head in a bandage after his car accident, Koestler was already well oiled on Connolly’s potent punch. Paget sat next to Hemingway over dinner but, embarrassed by her lover’s boorishness, tried to leave early, prompting what she called “violent protests” from Koestler. By the end of the party he had managed to insult everybody in the room.20
Unsurprisingly, given his state of mind, Koestler suffered from writer’s block. His doctor prescribed him drugs (possibly some form of amphetamine) to help him get past it, but he was nevertheless forced to abandon the novel he was working on. And while he was heartened by the success of Allied landings on D-Day, he grew increasingly concerned about the placatory rhetoric directed toward the Soviet Union. For his propaganda work he had been preoccupied with attacking the Nazis from every conceivable angle, but with the tide of war having turned, he feared the Allies were complacent about the threat posed by Stalin in a postwar world. It was during this period that he received a package of dog-eared manuscript pages from Orwell. Koestler read Animal Farm with enraptured rapidity. “Envious congratulations,” Koestler wrote to Orwell. “This is a glorious and heart-breaking allegory; it has the poesy of a fairytale and the precision of a chess problem. Reviewers will say that it ranks with Swift, and I shall agree with them.”21
ORWELL WROTE ANIMAL FARM in just over three months, beginning in November 1943 and finishing in February 1944. The book had been brewing ever since he returned from Spain with the idea 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.”22 The outbreak of war distracted him from those plans, but by the summer of 1942 he was back thinking about Spain again. Alex Comfort, an anarchist and pacifist (and future author of The Joy of Sex), approached Orwell to write an essay for New Road, a magazine he was editing. Over the following months, Orwell wrote the excoriating “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” which eventually came out, albeit with certain sections cut, in New Road in June 1943.23
Writing about Spain again stirred up dormant emotions and, after leaving the BBC in November and taking the position of literary editor at Tribune, he found he had time to go back to a story about the “Soviet myth.” “You will be glad to hear that I am writing a book again at last,” Orwell wrote to his literary agent, Leonard Moore. “While with the BBC I hardly had time to set pen to paper, but in this job with the Tribune I think I can so organise my time as to get 2 spare days a week for my own work. The thing I am doing is quite short, so if nothing intervenes it should be done in 3 or 4 months.”24 Orwell was clearly excited by the prospect of writing a new novel and told Philip Rahv, his editor at Partisan Review, about it in a letter a few days later.
Orwell’s idea was to take a genre and subvert it. He chose to tell his story of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent slide into Stalinism as a fairy tale. Animated by the philosophy of an old pig named Old Major (a fusion of Marx and Lenin), the animals of Manor Farm, angered by their treatment at the hands of their owner, Mr. Jones (Tsar Nicholas II), decide to rebel. The revolution is successfully led by the pigs Snowball (Trotsky) and Napoleon (Stalin), who subsequently defeat the farmer when he seeks to retake the farm in the Battle of the Cowshed (the Russian Civil War). For a brief period, the animals rejoice in their victory, and agree to live under the seven commandments of “Animalism,” which include vows not to drink, walk on two legs, sleep in beds, or kill other animals. The final commandment declares that “All Animals are Equal.”25
With Jones defeated, the pigs (the Bolsheviks) begin to consolidate their power, appropriating milk and apples for their own consumption (loosely analogous to the Kronstadt Rebellion) while the other animals are expected to do the work, with Boxer the horse (the proletariat) working hardest of all. A power struggle erupts between Snowball and Napoleon, which the latter wins, forcing Snowball into exile. (Napoleon was “especially successful with the sheep.”)26 Despite having earlier dismissed the idea, Napoleon now demands the animals build a windmill (the Five-Year Plan), and when it is destroyed in a storm, he blames Snowball for sabotaging the project: “The animals were shocked beyond measure to learn that even Snowball could be guilty of such an action.”27 Napoleon also seeks to change the methods of food production (collectivization), only for its failure to drive the animals to the brink of starvation. Nevertheless, the animals are forced to work even harder to rebuild the windmill with walls twice as thick.
The novel takes a sinister and violent turn as a group of pigs (Old Bolsheviks like Bukharin and Zinoviev) who had previously spoken up against Napoleon’s methods “confess” to being in league with Snowball and are executed (the Moscow Show Trials).28 They have their throats ripped out by a group of violent dogs (the NKVD) that Napoleon had secretly reared from pups. Other animals confess to similar crimes and are killed (the Yezhov Purges). The history of the animal rebellion is rewritten to eliminate Snowball’s role and aggrandize Napoleon’s heroics.
Through his chief propagandist, Squealer, Napoleon warns the animals that conflict with Mr. Pilkington (the United States and the United Kingdom), a neighboring farmer, is inevitable. As such, he tells the animals he plans to sell a pile of valuable timber to a rival farmer, Mr. Frederick (Nazi Germany). This alliance (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) is shattered when Napoleon discovers Frederick has paid in counterfeit currency and attacks Animal Farm (Operation Barbarossa). Frederick’s men blow up the windmill but are eventually repelled, although only at a great cost. The wounded Boxer is secretly sold to a knacker’s yard and, while the windmill is rebuilt, the animals see none of the benefits—such as modern stalls, plentiful food, shorter working days—that Snowball had promised them after the rebellion.
The pigs start walking on their hind legs, carrying whips and drinking whisky. The seven commandments are replaced by just one daubed on the wall of the barn: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”29 Napoleon decides to enter into a new alliance with his rival farmers. The novel famously ends with a dinner party where the pigs eat, drink, and play cards with humans (the Tehran Conference) and the watching animals are unable to distinguish between them: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again: but already it was impossible to say which was which.”30
The fable-like quality of the book and its subsequent status as a classic often obscure the fact that Orwell was writing about a contemporary crisis. The betrayal of Napoleon by Frederick, that is, Stalin’s betrayal by Hitler, had taken place only two years before he began the book, and the events on which Orwell had based the final scene of the novel had taken place as he was writing. The satire was biting and fresh and all the more effective for it.
As early as January 1944, Orwell told Moore that “we may have some difficulties about finding a publisher.”31 He was certain Gollancz would not take it and suspected Warburg would not, either. He asked Moore to look into which publishers had supplies of paper (which was being rationed). Orwell knew he would have to at least offer it to Gollancz, as he had first refusal on his fiction. Orwell described it as a “little fairy story, about 30,000 words, with a political meaning” but warned Gollancz that it was “completely unacceptable politically from your point of view (it is anti-Stalin).”32 Gollancz could not contain his annoyance at being called a Stalinist stooge; in 1941, he had edited Betrayal of the Left, a collection of essays attacking Communist policy in the wake of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a collection to which Orwell had contributed two essays. Orwell was not being entirely straight with Gollancz, however, as Animal Farm was more than merely an attack on Stalin—it was a root-and-branch critique of the Bolshevik revolution and the Communist society that had been constructed as a result. Once Gollancz had read the manuscript, he grudgingly acknowledged that Orwell was right: the satire of the book was too much for him and he could not publish “a general attack of this nature.”33
Orwell moved on quickly, giving the manuscript to André Deutsch, who recommended it to Nicholson & Watson. To Deutsch’s embarrassment they, too, rejected it. Orwell then took it to Jonathan Cape. One of the publisher’s readers, Veronica Wedgwood, had asked for Orwell’s work in the past, and Orwell thought they might go for Animal Farm. The signs were auspicious as Daniel George, the chief reader of fiction, recommended publication. In May, Orwell met with Cape, who agreed to publish. Contract negotiations began and Orwell was happy with the terms, only asking that publication happen as quickly as possible.34 He wanted his book out there before the war ended, to cut through the pro-Soviet sentiment of official propaganda.
On June 19, though, Cape wrote to Moore to tell him he was not going to publish after all. There had been some wrangling with Gollancz about the rights to Orwell’s future novels but the real reason for the rejection was more sinister. During negotiations, Cape told Moore that he wanted, “as a matter of policy” to consult a “senior official” at the Ministry of Information. At this meeting, the unnamed official discouraged publication. What is remarkable is that this official then followed up with a letter in which he told Cape that publishing Animal Farm would damage relations with the Soviet Union and therefore undermine the war effort. The pressure applied by the official caused Cape to crack. “I must confess that this expression of opinion has given me seriously to think,” Cape wrote to Moore. “I can see now that it might be regarded as something which it was highly ill-advised to publish at the present time.”35 Cape expressed particular concern that the leaders of the farmyard revolution were depicted as pigs. “I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people, and particularly to anyone who is a bit touchy, as undoubtedly the Russians are,” he wrote. When Orwell received a copy of the letter, he appended a pithy annotation in the margin: “balls.”
Orwell was furious. He used his regular column in Tribune to attack the practice of what he called “veiled censorship” by the Ministry of Information, although did not mention Cape by name. Wedgwood, one of the Cape readers who had recommended publication, left shortly afterward and offered to serialize Animal Farm in Time and Tide, but Orwell felt the magazine was too right-wing a venue and would lead to his novel being dismissed as reactionary anti-communism. Animal Farm was also rejected by Faber. T. S. Eliot wrote a long letter in which he explained that there was “no conviction . . . that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.”36 Orwell became disheartened. He suspected that Gollancz and the Ministry of Information were poisoning the well with mainstream firms, and he began to look seriously into self-publishing.
What Orwell did not know at the time, but came to later suspect, was that there was more going on than weak-willed capitulation to political censorship. The Ministry official who warned Cape against publication was Orwell’s old acquaintance from the Shanghai dining club, Peter Smollett—or, to give his real name, Hans Peter Smolka. Later awarded an OBE for his war work, Smolka was a slippery figure, and contradictory stories are told about his past. What is agreed is that he was a naturalized British citizen, originally from Austria, who had first arrived in the country in 1933 as a correspondent of Neue Freie Presse. Before that, he had been active in Vienna’s Communist underground. He was a friend of Litzi Friedmann, who, during the resistance to Dollfuss, introduced Smolka to her English lover, Kim Philby.
It is disputed when Smolka first began working for Soviet intelligence. According to one account he was recruited by the NKVD’s Teodor Maly, before he arrived in Britain and used his journalism as cover.37 Philby, on the other hand, claimed he was responsible for Smolka’s recruitment in 1939. “We used to run into each other at receptions and cocktail parties, and we had many friends in common,” Philby recalled. “He often came to me with news items, and sometimes in the form of ordinary routine gossip he brought me very valuable information. And, you know, he would wink as he did it.”38 Philby, in a break with his training, formalized the relationship (the winking was replaced by a system of offering each other cigarettes) but kept it secret from the NKVD’s London resident, Anatoly Gorsky. When Philby left town, he asked Burgess to discreetly liaise with Smolka in his stead, but the garrulous Burgess ended up revealing what was going on to Gorsky. As a result, a black mark was placed in Philby’s file and he suffered “several extremely unpleasant hours” as his handler reminded him of the importance of following the rules.39 A wary Moscow Center told Philby to drop relations with Smolka, who was given the code name “Abo” and passed on to Gorsky. They would have cause to thank Philby, however, when, two years later, Smolka secured his position at the Ministry of Information. Agent Abo’s intervention did not kill Animal Farm but delayed its publication, and subsequent impact, by as much as a year.
Orwell believed that Warburg, who had published Homage to Catalonia, might also find Animal Farm politically unpalatable, although that might have masked a desire on Orwell’s part to go with a publisher with a larger audience. Warburg’s firm was still relatively small-scale, had developed a reputation as a “Trotskyist” house, and their limitations were exacerbated by the paper shortage. Warburg gave every indication of wanting to publish Animal Farm, but Orwell did not show him the crumpled manuscript until late in July 1944. By the end of August, the deal was agreed (£100 advance) with a projected publication date of March 1945. As Orwell feared, however, paper rationing did result in the book being delayed until August, by which time the war in Europe was over.
Despite the difficulty in finding a publisher and the delays in production, Animal Farm was an immediate hit. All 4,500 copies of the first edition sold out, and Warburg had to start looking for more paper so that he could meet the demand of a second print run (a further ten thousand were printed in November). One story that Orwell later told Dwight Macdonald was that when the Queen Mother asked for a copy, Secker & Warburg had to apologize for being completely sold out, and the Royal Messenger had to go out in full regalia aboard his carriage to the anarchist bookshop on Red Lion Street for a copy.40
Frank Morley, an editor who had moved from Faber to Harcourt Brace in New York City, spent a day in Bowes & Bowes, a Cambridge bookshop, in an effort to find out what the British public was reading. Customers kept coming to ask for Animal Farm, which had sold out. Morley managed to get hold of a copy from the postal order department, read it, and decided his firm had to have it. It was published in the United States in August 1946, with a first edition of 50,000 copies. Animal Farm was then selected for the Book of the Month Club, which guaranteed it a huge readership: there were two Book of the Month Club printings, the first of 430,000 copies and the second of 110,000 copies.41
With Animal Farm, Orwell would far exceed the expectations he had of his novel finding a large readership; during his lifetime, the novel was translated into Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Farsi, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Telugu, and Ukrainian. He refused payment for translations made for editions distributed to refugees, students, and working-class organizations.42
Orwell’s urgency in getting Animal Farm out was well-founded. After six years of isolation and bombing, Britain was on its knees and there was a strong left-wing impetus toward social change. In June 1945, Clement Attlee’s Labour Party, which included many friends of Orwell’s, won the general election in a landslide. He saw for himself the devastation of France and Germany when he traveled there as a war correspondent for the Observer in the spring of 1945 and feared what would rise from the ashes. The huge losses suffered by the Soviet Union and the courage of the Red Army had provoked a revisionist assessment of Stalin and his rule. Communist groups had been some of the bravest resistance fighters all over Europe, and as the dust settled they began to mobilize politically. Animal Farm was Orwell’s way of warning of the risks of giving ground (both figuratively and literally) to Stalinism. He felt the British, especially, did not grasp the full horror of totalitarianism.
This was not a recent epiphany. Back in September 1944, he had written an essay about Koestler’s work in which he warned of the consequences of the fact that “there is almost no English writer to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside.” Orwell made himself at least a partial exception to this, having witnessed the purges of Spain. “The special world created by secret police forces, censorship of opinion, torture, and frame-up trials is, of course, known about and to some extent disapproved of,” Orwell wrote, “but it has made very little emotional impact. One result of this is there exists in England almost no literature of disillusionment with the Soviet Union.”43 The left was facing a postwar reckoning without the common enemy of fascism. “The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards,” Orwell wrote, “is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.”44
READING ANIMAL FARM unlocked something in Koestler. He started to write with an emetic abandon. He began an essay on the Soviet Union and Stalinism that grew into three essays: “Anatomy of Myth,” “Soviet Myth and Reality,” and “The End of an Illusion.” This triptych drew deeply on his own experiences to point out the radical disjunction between what the Soviet Union purported to be and what the reality was on the ground. He recalled seeing from a train the starving peasants of Ukraine during the great famine of 1932–33, a catastrophe that did not officially exist in the Soviet Union. The power of these essays was drawn from the fact that as an ardent Communist Koestler had allowed himself to be deceived. He had denied the famine despite seeing those starving peasants with his own eyes. “My bones ache from writing 12 hours per day, can’t sleep,” he wrote in his diary. “Got diarrhoea, and this is happiness.”45
In May 1945, Koestler published these essays in The Yogi and the Commissar, a collection put out, ironically enough, by Jonathan Cape. This latest success was further evidence that, as one reviewer remarked, Koestler was becoming a cult figure: “Mr Koestler has raised ex-communism to the status of a glamorous and almost Byronic career, and I find Koestlerian young men talking of their entirely mythical communist past merely to seem more interesting.”46 After a visit to a febrile Palestine, Koestler returned to Britain buzzing with plans. He was determined that he would be involved in the cultural and intellectual reconstruction of Europe and, to that end, he invited Orwell to spend Christmas with him to discuss what lay ahead.
The invitation was not entirely about business. The previous year, while in hospital in Cologne with a bronchial illness, not long after his purported meeting with Hemingway, Orwell received a wire from the Observer that his wife, Eileen, had died. Her health had been precarious in the preceding months; she was pale, fatigued, losing weight, and suffering from persistent bleeding. With doctors concerned about a cancerous growth, she had undergone a hysterectomy at a hospital in Newcastle and died of cardiac arrest while under general anesthetic.47 There are conflicting accounts of how Orwell responded. Close friends said he grieved bitterly, but those who knew him less well found him unnervingly stoic. He went back out to Europe after the funeral to finish his reporting stint. The couple had adopted a son, Richard, in the summer of 1944 and Orwell, typically pragmatic, decided that the boy needed a mother. On his return, he began proposing to women he knew. Knowing this, Koestler and Paget decided to play matchmaker, setting up Orwell with her twin sister, Celia Kirwan, who was recently separated and seeking a divorce. Koestler and Paget were living in Bwlch Ocyn, a remote seventeenth-century farmhouse in North Wales. Orwell, carrying Richard in one hand and his suitcase in the other, met Kirwan on the platform in London. On the train ride to Llandudno she found him compelling, and it was the beginning of an important friendship. Kirwan gently rejected his eventual proposal.
The visit did not begin auspiciously. Koestler had written a play, Twilight Bar, which Orwell had (rightly) trashed in the December issue of Tribune. Orwell did not think this sort of criticism should be taken personally; Koestler had an ungodly temper. When Koestler picked up Orwell and Kirwan in Llandudno, there was an awkward silence in the car. “That was a bloody awful review you wrote, wasn’t it?” Koestler said, no longer able to contain himself. “Yes,” replied Orwell. “And it’s a bloody awful play, isn’t it.”
The frostiness did not last, however, and on long walks in the hills around his home, Koestler told Orwell of the need to form a new intellectual group to take the lead in debates about the postwar world. Too many of the existing organizations, he argued, were Soviet fronts or weak at the knees. His plan was to establish the League for the Dignity and Rights of Man to fight against totalitarianism, and he persuaded Orwell to write the manifesto. Orwell composed it inside a week and Koestler sent it to Bertrand Russell, who was living across the valley. The philosopher agreed to join so long as there was greater emphasis placed on opposing atomic weapons. Koestler pushed the idea of “psychological disarmament,” by which he meant he wanted free circulation of texts and ideas, unrestricted travel, and an end to censorship. He knew it was a policy the Soviet Union could not stomach.
The proposed League fell apart, however, under rather sordid circumstances. Koestler verbally attacked Russell’s wife, Patricia, who was representing him in discussions while Russell was in Cambridge. As a result, Russell withdrew. As it turned out, Russell was having an affair in Cambridge, which Patricia knew about, and as revenge she might (or might not) have slept with Koestler while Paget was in London. There were conflicting allegations, and the relationship between Koestler and Russell soured. Whatever happened, there was more going on than a dispute about manifesto rhetoric. To complete the circle, Paget recorded in her diary that Russell made a pass at her.
As the League fizzled out, Orwell and Koestler started to head in different directions. They disagreed about the most effective way to take on the Soviet Union and totalitarianism more generally. Koestler was increasingly vested in confrontational cultural warfare. He wanted collective action, to rally writers to the cause, and deploy some of the tactics he had learned from the Comintern against the enemy. In the coming years, the early phases of the Cold War, he became one of the most vocal agitators on the front line against Soviet Communism. Orwell, his health increasingly fragile, felt the urgency to work, believing that his writing was a far more formidable weapon against totalitarianism. That had to take priority. When Koestler tried to persuade him to head up the British branch of PEN, the international writers’ advocacy group, Orwell declined, saying it was “just throwing one’s time and abilities down the drain.”48 In order to protect his time and his writing, Orwell retreated. While Koestler was embarked on a journey that would take him to New York, Paris, and Berlin and involve him in the clandestine work of the CIA, Orwell used the earnings from Animal Farm to buy a farmhouse on the Scottish island of Jura, where he wrote his most important, and final, book: Nineteen Eighty-Four.