Several animals emerge with no credit whatsoever from Animal Farm. Benjamin the donkey is a case-hardened pessimist, as stolidly indifferent to conditions under the new regime as he was to the tyranny of Farmer Jones. The sheep are credulous dimwits, whose only function is to chant their approval for Napoleon’s self-aggrandizing schemes, while the Manor Farm cat is simply an opportunist, keener on eating the local birdlife and its rabbits rather than welcoming them into the communal fold. In the end, though, these turn out to be minor transgressions. With the exception of Snowball — a farsighted visionary whom Napoleon promptly chases off into exile — the pigs are the villains of the piece.
Item one on an extensive charge sheet is the wholesale betrayal of revolutionary principle and the substitution of collective decision-making with a wool-pulling autocracy. Item two is the assassination of political opponents. Item three is a consistent disregard for the concept of objective truth. But this is only the tip of an iceberg of callous, porcine depravity. To tyranny, violence, duplicity, and falsehood can be added hypocrisy, drunkenness, promiscuity, and (we infer) cheating at cards. The pigs may be clever and tactically astute, good at building windmills, brewing beer, and learning to walk on their hind legs. But all their expertise is put to malign ends. Orwell, clearly, loathes them from the start.
This detestation is all the more remarkable for the personal context from which it emerges. Orwell is the animal lover par excellence, as obsessed and enlivened by the traffic of hedgerow and pasture as many a paid-up “nature” writer. His correspondence from the 1930s is crammed with excited reportage from nature rambles; the baby hedgehogs who strayed into his parents’ house in Southwold were assured of the warmest of welcomes. Significantly, this enthusiasm had a practical side. Fetched up in a cottage in the Hertfordshire village of Wallington in 1937, he immediately set about establishing a smallholding, purchased a pair of goats and a crate of hens, and seems to have regarded himself as a modern-day Tolstoy set down on the East Anglian flat.
And distance made the heart grow fonder. Convalescing in French Morocco in the winter of 1938-39, half his letters home are to the neighbor installed in the Wallington cottage and tasked with looking after the livestock. And yet, the Orwell smallholding always harbors a significant absence, a gaping hole that most small farmers of the time would have hastened to fill. Where is the pig?
We know that Orwell was conscious of this deficiency. In Coming up for Air, written during the stay in North Africa, George Bowling finds himself camped out at a munitions dump in Cornwall toward the end of the 1914-18 war in the company of Private Lidgebird, a one-time market gardener, who is rapidly reverting to type: “Even before I got to Twelve Mile Dump he’d dug a patch round one of the huts and started planting spuds, … and towards the end of the year he suddenly produced a pig from God knows where.”
The pig, you see, is the smallholder’s calling card, his badge of authenticity. But where the fictional Private Lidgebird had led, the real-life Orwell did not yet care to follow. Clearly, he had observed pigs at close hand — Animal Farm reveals a deep-rooted fascination with how farm life works, its routines, the hundred little details that keep the agricultural ship afloat. Equally clearly, he was not impressed by their behavioral quirks, and the distaste for pig life that flows into the novel played a substantial part in the difficulties he experienced in getting it published. It was not just that Orwell turned the allied war leader Stalin and his henchmen into pigs. It was also that, at the same time, the pigs were obviously squandering their God-given talents. As T.S. Eliot put it in his letter from Faber & Faber rejecting the book, “…after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm….”
But Orwell was getting ready to bite the bullet. For on the Scottish Inner Hebridean island of Jura, where he rented a remote farmhouse between 1946 and 1948, a pig finally made an appearance among the ranks of livestock. What does Orwell think of this (unnamed) animal? Part of him is impressed by its resourcefulness: “He has grown to a stupendous size on milk and potatoes, without our buying any food from outside,” he reported at one stage. But his fundamental dislike of the breed remained. “They really are disgusting brutes and we are all longing for the day when he goes to the butcher,” he explained to a friend.
At the heart of this distaste was straightforward fastidiousness, a sensibility that for some reason could not tolerate the sight of the average pig in action. But when did Orwell decide that a pig could be anthropomorphized, or vice versa? Coming up for Air contains a curious passage in which Bowling revisits Lower Binfield, the Oxfordshire town in which he was brought up:
“At the other end of the market-place the High Street rises a little. And down this little hill a herd of pigs was galloping, a huge flood of pig-faces. The next moment, of course, I saw what it was. It wasn’t pigs at all, it was only the schoolchildren in their gas-masks. … But I tell you that for a moment they looked exactly like a herd of pigs.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Orwell maintained that he got the idea for Animal Farm sometime in 1937 when he saw a small boy directing a cart horse down a country lane and wondered what would happen if the horse refused to play ball. But you suspect that the real prod came sometime the following year. Orwell spent the spring and summer of 1938 at a sanatorium near Aylesford in Kent recovering from a life-threatening hemorrhage. It seems a reasonable assumption that at some point during his stay, perhaps on one of his visits to Aylesford, he saw a crowd of gas mask-wearing children out in the street and made the connection that lies at Animal Farm’s pig-hating heart.
D.J. Taylor’s newest book, Who is Big Brother? A Reader’s Guide to George Orwell will be published by Yale University Press on April 26.