British Library Digitizes T.S. Eliot's Animal Farm Rejection Letter

As director of Faber & Faber, T.S. Eliot rejected George Orwell's now-classic Animal Farm explaining “we have no conviction … that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation.” It's one of many modern and contemporary literature artifacts newly digitized by British Library, as we mentioned only moments ago. Via Guardian:

Addressing the author as “Dear Orwell”, Eliot, then a director at publishing firm Faber & Faber, writes on 13 July 1944 that the publisher will not be acquiring Animal Farm for publication. Eliot described its strengths: “We agree that it is a distinguished piece of writing; that the fable is very skilfully handled, and that the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane – and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver.”

Animal Farm, a beast fable that satirised Stalinism and depicted Stalin as a traitor, was rejected by at least four publishers, with many, like Eliot, feeling it was too controversial at a time when Britain was allied with the Soviet Union against Germany.

“I think my own dissatisfaction with this apologue is that the effect is simply one of negation. It ought to excite some sympathy with what the author wants, as well as sympathy with his objections to something: and the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing,” wrote Eliot to Orwell. “And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm – in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.”

Animal Farm went on to be published by Secker & Warburg in August 1945. In a preface by Orwell, not printed until 1972, the author says that when he wrote the book, in 1943: “It was obvious that there would be great difficulty in getting it published.”

“If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution, but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves,” wrote Orwell.

Continue at the Guardian.