US-born poet T.S. Eliot refused to publish British novelist George Orwell s Animal Farm because of its Trotskyite and unconvincing viewpoint, according to a newly-released letter.
Eliot, working at British publishers Faber and Faber, sent a rejection letter to the young Orwell in 1944 dismissing the book, which went on to become a classic of modern English literature.
Animal Farm – which is generally seen as an allegory on Stalinist communism in Russia -was only published the following year, after the end of World War II.
Orwell s usual publisher Gollancz had refused to publish it, so the young writer tried his luck with Faber and Faber. But Eliot was not impressed, saying Orwell s view which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing.
We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticize the political situation at the current time, he said.
After all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore are the best qualified to run the farm.
In fact there couldn t have been an Animal Farm without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue) was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs, he added.
Orwell s famous novel tells the story of a group of animals who take over a farm, and at first believe themselves free of their oppressors. But gradually the pigs take over in a new tyranny, led by head pig Napoleon.
This was generally seen as an allegory of how the Russian revolution in 1917 was followed by a new form of brutal rule under the Soviet Union.
Animal Farm – including the satirical line All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others – was first published in August 1945 by Secker and Warburg.
Eliot went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948. His rejection letter to Orwell has been released by Valerie Eliot, 82, the Anglo-American poet s widow, for an upcoming BBC documentary.
