Snowball's Chance (2 page)

On April 6, a week later, Orwell wrote to his friend Richard Rees, asking him to find and send “a quarto notebook with a pale bluish cardboard cover” containing “a list of list of crypto-Communists and fellow-travellers which I want to bring up to date.” Rees duly dispatched the notebook and Orwell wrote on May 2 to Kirwan, “I enclose a list with about 35 names,” modestly adding that “I don’t suppose it will tell your friends anything they don’t know,” and reflecting that, although the IRD probably had tabs on the subjects already, “it isn’t a bad idea to have people who are probably unreliable listed.”

Reviewing this sequence in the
London Review of Books
early in 2000, Perry Anderson emphasized some important points. Orwell knew the destination of the list, and “was very anxious to keep the list hidden.” It remains thus. Though 99 names from the notebook are displayed in Vol. XX of Orwell’s Collected Works, with another 36 withheld by the editor for fear of libel, the list of 35 remains a state secret, lodged in the Foreign Office archives.

Those secret advisories to an IRD staffer had consequences. Blacklists usually do. No doubt the list was passed on in some form to American intelligence that made due note of those listed as fellow travelers and duly proscribed them under the McCarran Act.

Hitchens has written softly of Orwell’s “tendresse” for Kirwan, as though love rather than loyalty led him forward. Against the evidence under our noses he insists Orwell “wasn’t interested in unearthing heresy or in getting people fired or in putting them under the discipline of loyalty oath.” Although as opposed to the mellow tendresse for secret agent Kirwan, he had “an acid contempt for the Communists who had betrayed their cause and their country once before and might do so again.”

Here Orwell would surely have given a vigorous nod. Orwell’s defenders claim that he was only making sure the wrong sort of person wasn’t hired by the Foreign Office to write essays on the British ways of life. But Orwell made it clear to the IRD he was identifying people who were “unreliable” and who, worming their way into organizations like the British Labor Party, “might be able to do enormous mischief.” Loyalty was the issue, and it’s plain enough from his annotations that Orwell thought that
Jews, blacks, and homosexuals had an inherent tropism towards treachery to the values protected by the coalition of patriots including himself and the IRD. G.D.H. Cole, Orwell noted, was “shallow,” a “sympathizer” and also a “diabetic.”

There seems to be general agreement by Orwell’s fans left and right, to skate gently over these Orwellian suspicions of Jews, homosexuals, and blacks, also the extreme ignorance of his assessments, reminiscent of police intelligence files the world over. Of Paul Robeson Orwell wrote, “very anti-white. [Henry] Wallace supporter.” Only a person who instinctively thought all blacks were anti-white could have written this piece of stupidity. One of Robeson’s indisputable features, consequent upon his intellectual disposition and his connections with the Communists, was that he was most emphatically not “very anti-white,” Ask the Welsh coal miners for whom Robeson campaigned.

If any other postwar intellectual was suddenly found to have written mini-diatribes about blacks, homosexuals, and Jews, we can safely assume that subsequent commentary would not have been forgiving. There was certainly no forgivenness for Mencken. But Orwell gets a pass. “Deutscher [Polish Jew],” “Driberg, Tom. English Jew,” “Chaplin, Charles (Jewish?).” No denunciations from the normally sensitive Norman Podhoretz.

When someone becomes a saint, everything is mustered as testimony to his holiness. So it is with St. George and his list. Thus, in 1998, when the list became an issue, we have fresh endorsement of all the cold war constructs as they were shaped in the immediate postwar years, when the cold war coalition from right to left signed on
to fanatical anti-Communism. The IRD, disabled in the seventies by a Labor Foreign Minister on the grounds it was a sinkhole of rightwing nuts, would have been pleased.

Orwell’s
Animal Farm
is a powerful fable, though as I’ve noted, in my experience, the effect of the fable has mostly been to deride the utopian impulse. Orwell as Weasel is a powerful fable too, as powerful as the awful saga of betrayal conducted by that other Cold War saint, Ignacio Silone. “The Fable of the Weasel” is cautionary, not least about defenders of Orwell’s conduct. If they thought what he did was okay, or even better than okay, somehow an act of sublime bravery, should one not assume that they regard snitching against Traitors to the West as a moral duty too. We have been warned. John Reed’s parody in
Snowball’s Chance
warns us too, how the non-Com side plays on Orwell’s very field.

THE OLD PIGS WERE DYING. FIRST, IT WAS Dominicus—a secondary functionary who had given over his life to that rather crucial task of interpreting and graphing statistical data. He wore black-rimmed glasses and liked to sing opera as he sat at his desk—where, one drizzly afternoon, he collapsed into a plate of Camembert. By unanimous proclamation, he was named Animal Hero, First Class. The next pig to die was Napoleon himself. The great Berkshire boar. The father of all animals. Savior of equality, liberty, and freedom. He had died in a manner fit to his station—passing in his sleep, between sheets of Egyptian cotton (with an extremely high thread-count).

In commemorative tribute, a twelve-foot statue of Napoleon was erected outside the barnhouse, at the former site of Old Major’s skull, for those who remembered Old Major, the pig who had started it all, and those days—those early, early days.

The statue was bronze—Napoleon wore his black coat and his leather leggings. Standing on his hind-legs, he puffed his pipe and looked to the horizon. Behind the statue, painted in white letters on the tar wall of the barn, was the single Commandment—
Most animals are equalish
. To the left of the Commandment, the verses
of
Founding Father Napoleon
were painted in the same white letters. The poem, dedicated to the fallen leader, was authored by Minimus, who was known to be a pig with a poetic soul—

To further observe the accomplishments of the great Leader, the portrait of Napoleon, which surmounted the poem, was refreshed. Six pigeons, with a retouch of color, gave dimension to the white profile—under the tutelage of the pigs, the birds had acquired the skill of rendering.

In the year that followed, several more of the old-time
swiners cast off their mortal coil. One would drown in the bathtub (through no fault of his own) when he found himself unable to get out. Another would fall victim to a swollen liver—downing his last mug of whiskey, he quietly moved on to the next life. Yet another would die of a patient torturer called cancer—fortunately, as he had long taken up Napoleon’s habit of enjoying a good pipe several times an hour, he was offered much consolation in his final months. All, heroes of the rebellion, were declared Animal Heroes, First Class.

The younger pigs filled their places well-enough, it seemed, though they were a reserved generation—more aloof, and perhaps, more lenient. They were led by their elder, Squealer, who for years had been Napoleon’s chief counselor. He was a pig who could wag his tail and tongue quite persuasively—so much so that in the end, he may have convinced even himself that he was a pig of the populace. Though he had been saying for years that rations were increasing, for the first time that anyone could remember (aside from the pigs, who were always firm in their conviction that things were always getting better) it seemed possible that the ration-bag was a little rounder—and noticeably so. When Squealer died, he himself had grown so fat that he was blinded by his own face. The cause of death, it was pronounced, was over-work.

In another first (or at least the first that anyone could remember), this pronouncement by the pigs was openly derided. At the posthumous awards presentation (Animal Hero, First Class), there were even a few stealthy hecklers—hooters and honkers. Squealer wasn’t so terrible, after all—but surely, a pig who in his last days was
pushed around in a wheelbarrow, as he could not even sustain his girth on four legs, was no pig who had, as it was claimed, died of “a lifetime of exertion.” It would have taken old Squealer himself to explain that a pig buried in a piano case wasn’t funny.

The last of the old pigs to take control was Minimus. He, like the others before him, was considered one of the original heroes of the rebellion. (And yet, his ascent was cause for much surprise, as aside from compose a few poems, nobody could accurately pinpoint what he had done.) Though robust, Minimus was quite advanced in years—and to address concerns that the next succession might be turbulent, Pinkeye, the most powerful, and incidentally, well-liked pig of the younger generation, was selected to fill the newly created position, Next Leader.

So Pinkeye kissed ducklings and lambs, as Minimus went about managing the farm. A silent Leader, Minimus was a mystery to be feared and respected. The dogs were loyal to his service, as were the other pigs, just as it had always been. And yet there was a new calm—unprecedented—a calm bespeaking, perhaps, a better future, or perhaps, the darkness of days to come.

It was one night—an average sort of normal May night—that there was an extra-extraordinary disturbance in the stalls. The moon low on the horizon, a figure had appeared at the gates. It was a strange figure—unfamiliar in his dark suit with pleated pants and a wide-lapel. The animal (was it an animal?) walked on two feet, wore shoes and a brimmed hat, and carried a briefcase. A few steps behind him, a goat was similarly accoutered. (Was it a goat? Yes, it was a goat. Surely, a most sophisticated goat.)

The dog in attendance at the outer gate barked ferociously at the pair—though not many of the barn animals paid him much mind, as the dogs at the outer gate were particularly high-strung beasts, known to be incited to woof by causes so innocuous as moon shadows and silverfish. One of the cows, no doubt bolstered by the anonymity of night, belted out her exasperation at having been, once again, so rudely awoken—

“Shaaat-up!”

In actuality, however, the scene that took place at the outer gate was not nearly so common as the cow imagined—for although the cause of the shepherd’s excitement was a stranger, and not a silverfish, after what seemed scarcely more than a few well-chosen words, the guard dog, having dropped to his forelegs, was backing away on his belly. Mouth closed, eyes wide, he lowered his head and tucked his tail under his haunches—as the briefcased pair, cutting elegant if foreboding silhouettes against the indigo sky, breached the outer gate with no more discussion.

From her perch in the hayloft, Norma the cat, who had been watching the moon through the chinks in the barn, was the single animal to witness the brief exchange. Norma, like most cats, was more interested in being a cat than a member of the Manor Farm. Yet she was an extremely personable creature—always playful. And, excepting those times she was lazing around in the shade while the other animals were huffing in the sun, she was widely appreciated.

“Sssssssss!” she hissed at the broken windowpane—her back arched, her claws extended, her hair on end.

This, as would be expected, immediately woke the
rats, who endeavored to keep themselves well attuned to the cat. Seeing that Norma was nowhere near their nest (for there were nights when the feline, overly affable, chose from among them some unfortunate favorite to frolic to death), the rats scurried along the high beams to see for themselves what had caused such unease.

What the rats saw were the two figures—a goat, and now it could be discerned, a pig—crossing the hayfield to the barn.

The sheep too, arising, looked to the nearing comers. Nervously, they paced their stalls. “Ohhhh,” they fretted anxiously—

“Shall we worry? Shall we worry?”

With that, the old donkey Benjamin woke. Benjamin was the oldest animal on the farm (as old as yesterday itself, said some of the geese) and lowering his fourth leg, as donkeys sleep on three legs, he turned to a slat missing from the side of his stall—his eyes cynical and bitter as ever.

As the story went, long ago, Benjamin had suffered some disappointment, and maybe lost a friend, or two. And that was why he hardly spoke, except to utter an occasional—

“None of you have seen a donkey die, and none of you will.”

This was said with an enormous remorse. And as he spoke, Benjamin would look at an animal as if he knew exactly where that animal was in his or her life. And the farm animals shuddered to look back at Benjamin, as each of them had personally experienced this cruel wisdom—Benjamin looking at you, and remembering the day you were born, and knowing what day you were in,
and foreseeing the day you would die. And then, Benjamin turning coolly away, and rather than weeping, saying—

“Hard life goes on,” which was the other thing he said.

But tonight, as Benjamin lifted his head to look out at the figures crossing the hayfield, an animation, however briefly, flitted across his face. In his expression, there was fear, and glee—and even hope. All the animals were riveted on Benjamin—
what would he make of the figures?
Even the three steeds—who were argued by the sheep to be the dumbest animals on the farm—knew enough to gauge Benjamin for some answer.