Sharpe's Opinion
Thursday, 9th Apr, 2009
Orwell’s Letter of Rejection from T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot declined publishing Animal Farm. Thanks to The Times Archive, courtesy of Brent Simmons, and via Daring Fireball, now we know why:
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.
Brilliant!
Comments
As I was going to mention on Twitter (and still might), I didn’t much like Animal Farm. It’s a simplistic allegory which Orwell draws out far beyond its worth, uses to batter the reader over the head, and generally insults his audience’s intelligence with.
When combined with his utterly vacuous diatribe on ‘Politics and the English Language’, his stated goal ‘to make political writing into an art’ seems laughable. One has to wonder if Nineteen Eighty-Four was just a fluke.
Wrong enough for you?
(And yes, I do actually believe all the above)
Some people need a simplistic alegory, though.
I hated Animal Farm because we did it again and again and again in secondary school English lessons. Years later, I read it and quite liked it.
And the essay just says that it would be nice if people wrote proper, like. Nowt wrong wi’dat. 
Well… I wasn’t going to point it out…
“Some people need a simplistic alegory, though.”
For them, there’s Aesop. If you need a simplistic allegory, why are you reading a 112 page novel?
Don’t get me wrong, Animal Farm has some good points, and would have made a fantastic short story. As a novel, though, it has serious issues.
If you need a simplistic allegory, why are you reading a 112 page novel?
Plenty of time to spare?
May be you don’t realise you need one?
(Wait til you see the page count for the large print version!)
Sounds very pompous and arrogant, Stu. Could you perhaps help by making it wrong in some way?
patently
April 9, 2009 at 2:08 pm