Public-spirited Pigs

The Times Online brings us an amusing anecdote about T.S. Eliot and George Orwell:

T S Eliot, one of Britain’s greatest poets, rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm for publication on the grounds of its unconvincing Trotskyite politics.

Eliot, a former director of Faber and Faber, the publisher, wrote his rejection in a highly critical letter in 1944, one of many private papers made available for the first time by his widow Valerie

[Wrote Eliot]: "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."

The fact that Eliot didn't 'get it' doesn't surprise me at all. The man was an anglophile and a political simpleton.

Eliot was born American, emigrated to England, later abandoned his U.S. citizenship to become an English subject, and was never the least shy about telling people that he was a staunch royalist. Thus he saw Orwell's pigs not as the authoritarian statists -- as Orwell intended -- but rather as slightly mis-guided nobility, who only needed a refresher on the importance of noblesse oblige.

While Eliot may well have been the first to misinterpret Orwell's masterpiece, he certainly wasn't the last: every peacenik hippie of the 60s and 70s got it completely wrong, (you'll recall they enjoyed referring to policemen as "pigs".) That they and their modern-day copycats have enabled rather than hindering statism in America is perhaps the ultimate irony of Orwell's legacy.

All that said, I have always rather liked Eliot's poetry, (as much as I am capable of liking any poetry... which isn't much, I admit). His writings are generally interesting without becoming obscure or obtuse. And at least he understood capitalization and punctuation -- unlike some people.