“...not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.””
May 30, 2016 5:16 AM   Subscribe

TS Eliot's rejection of Orwell's Animal Farm [The Guardian] Digitised for the first time by the British Library, Eliot’s rejection is now available to read alongside others including Virginia Woolf’s to James Joyce. Eliot’s letter is one of more than 300 items which have been digitised by the British Library, a mixture of drafts, diaries, letters and notebooks by authors ranging from Virginia Woolf to Angela Carter and Ted Hughes. The literary archive reveals that Orwell was not the only major writer to suffer a series of rejections: the British Library has also digitised a host of rejections for James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, showing how his patron Harriet Shaw Weaver attempted to find a printer for the novel she had published in serialised form in The Egoist. posted by Fizz (18 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Mind, you can never really have enough public-spirited pigs ...
posted by oheso at 5:19 AM on May 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


I just linked to some random archival entries that were highlighted on the main page of the British Library. There is quite a bit more: drafts, diaries, letters, photographs, notebooks, etc. Dig deeper.
posted by Fizz at 5:19 AM on May 30, 2016


I find it amusing that Orwell conducted a prolonged literary feud with HG Wells.
posted by My Dad at 5:26 AM on May 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


Rejection letters tend to be polite and elegant and only look foolish in retrospect, when you've rejected, say, _Animal Farm_.
posted by chavenet at 5:29 AM on May 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


I find it amusing that Orwell conducted a prolonged literary feud with HG Wells.

I do not mean to derail this conversation into a discussion about HG Wells. But considering that Wells was a misogynist jerk, I do not find this surprising at all. He literally changed his wife's name from Amy to Jane. And he also sent his wife away during her pregnancy while he stayed in town with his mistress. What a twat. Katie Roiphe's literary biography is worth picking up. [The Guardian Book Review: Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939 by Katy Roiphe]
posted by Fizz at 5:32 AM on May 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


Rejection letters tend to be polite and elegant and only look foolish in retrospect, when you've rejected, say, _Animal Farm_.

Yet the letter is also insightful regarding the limitations of the book; Orwell hardly intended Animal Farm to be drafted by political conservatives, and that is precisely what happened. I'm not sure Orwell would view it as a literary success given where and when it is invoked most often.
posted by kewb at 5:53 AM on May 30, 2016 [4 favorites]


Rejection letters tend to be polite and elegant

Oh, I've got a number of curt and crude in my collection. My favorite has a coffee ring on it.

Even the best, those that are nice, regretful even, and laying blame on bean counters, are nothing as extensive as Eliot's. (Granted, even then Orwell had greater recognition than I do, but still.)

I liked that Orwell thought it reasonable to expect an answer within the week.

A different age....
posted by BWA at 5:56 AM on May 30, 2016



A different age....


Not so different, the payments are exactly the same!
posted by The Whelk at 6:00 AM on May 30, 2016 [12 favorites]


Reading some of the rejection letters for James Joyce: On the printing of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses

And the following is quite fascinating:
We have read the chapters of Mr. Joyce's novel with great interest, and we wish that we could offer to print it. But the length is an insuperable difficulty to us at present. We can get no one to help us, and at our rate of progress a book of 300 pages would take at least two years to produce -- which, is of course, out of the question for you or Mr. Joyce.

We very much regret this as it is our aim to produce writing of merit which the ordinary publisher refuses. Our equipment is so small, however, that we are finding it difficult to bring out a book of less than 100 pages. We have tried to buy a larger press but without success, and therefore we are afraid that is useless to attempt anything more ambitious.”
That has to be extremely frustrating as a writer, knowing that your work is good enough to be published but that it cannot be printed because of technical and economic limits out of your control.
posted by Fizz at 6:22 AM on May 30, 2016


Of the Ballardiana they’ve made available, I was particularly interested to see his Four Text Collages from 1958. Thanks for the post, Fizz!
posted by misteraitch at 6:37 AM on May 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yet the letter is also insightful regarding the limitations of the book; Orwell hardly intended Animal Farm to be drafted by political conservatives, and that is precisely what happened. I'm not sure Orwell would view it as a literary success given where and when it is invoked most often.

Yet, as a "political conservative", Eliot totally overlooked the political uses of the book.
posted by ennui.bz at 7:34 AM on May 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yet, as a "political conservative", Eliot totally overlooked the political uses of the book.

It's parallel to libertarian privilege, being blindly obvious to the real life implications and consequences of your abstract arguments.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:28 AM on May 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


Fizz: "Our equipment is so small"

True of so many Joyce critics!
posted by chavenet at 9:39 AM on May 30, 2016 [5 favorites]


chavenet,

I just snort-laughed my water all over the keyboard. So thanks for that.
posted by Fizz at 10:23 AM on May 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


Rejection letters tend to be polite and elegant and only look foolish in retrospect, when you've rejected, say, _Animal Farm_.

There is nothing whatever about Eliot's rejection letter that is foolish. For example, he does not say the book 'needs more public-spirited pigs;' he says the book is not clear enough in its positive sympathies to prevent certain hypothetical readers from taking that away as the main message.

It's a very cogent letter whether you like the book better than he did or not.
posted by queenofbithynia at 10:42 AM on May 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


To Eliot, some animals being more equal than others is quite natural and proper, and makes socialism an evil.

To Orwell, some animals believing they're more equal than others is natural but lamentable, and makes socialism an unattainable good.

Precisely where they differ is what a regarding what a decent society should desire of the pigs: for Eliot, public spiritedness, for Orwell, self-abnegation.
posted by MattD at 1:30 PM on May 30, 2016 [2 favorites]


But I have to say that for the literature course I am going to teach in retirement, I now LOVE the idea of the assignment "imagine you are an editor of orthogonal political sympathy to work X, but recognize the works merit; now write a letter no more than one page single-spaced rejecting it for publication."
posted by MattD at 1:33 PM on May 30, 2016 [2 favorites]


Orwell started out as a socialist but became disillusioned with what was happening in the Soviet Union and their betrayal of the Spanish Revolution, so he bitterly hated Stalin.

HG Wells, on the other hand, loved Stalin, and even visited him, which didn't help with Orwell's impressions of Wells.
posted by eye of newt at 2:03 PM on May 30, 2016


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