Arion Press publishes a new illustrated edition of Animal Farm with a foreword by Peter Stansky

Arion Press of San Francisco CA, who specialise in publishing Limited Edition Books with Original Art, have recently published a new and wonderfully illustrated edition of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The book includes an authoratitive introduction by the historian and Orwell Society founder member Peter Stansky, which is reproduced below, and twenty-four prints by the artist Jonathan Hammer, and an extra suite of the prints, hand-colored, December 2013. Edition of 300, $600.

– See more at: http://www.arionpress.com/catalog/099.htm

Clearly this is a very special edition which would have huge value to a collector of special editions of works as influential as Animal Farm.

Foreword to new edition of Animal Farm by Peter Stansky

It might be useful as an introduction to this great work, Animal Farm, to provide first a succinct account of George Orwell’s life, the broader context of the book, before looking at the genesis of Animal Farm in a little more detail. George Orwell was the wintry conscience not only for England, but for much of the world through his two most influential books Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). He was born Eric Arthur Blair in India in 1903 where his father was a civil servant with a position supervising the opium trade. In 1907 with his mother, who was, though English born, of French descent from a family in the timber business in Burma, and his older sister, Marjorie, he came to England where the family settled in Henley, joined by a younger sister, Avril. Orwell’s father, except for leaves, remained in India until 1912. Orwell, with that social precision for which he became famous, characterized himself as a member of the “lower-upper middle class.” They had that position because of descent from a younger son of the aristocracy and from Church of England clergymen, but not much cash to keep it up. As was the custom among his class, at the age of eight he was sent away to a boarding school, St. Cyprians, but he needed to be there on scholarship, which he resented. Years later he wrote powerfully about his experiences there in “Such, Such Were the Joys.” The strength of his prose is such that the reader is convinced that the truth is being put forward. Orwell is much more of an artist than is generally allowed, and is a creator of worlds through his writings. Hate the school as he did, it nevertheless gave him a good education and helped instill in him, in reaction, his particular sort of socialism imbued with love of his country. His first two school boy publications during the First World War were highly patriotic poems in the Henley paper. He achieved the coveted position of being a King’s Scholar at Eton and was there from 1917 to 1921. He had an undistinguished academic career and quite unusually for a Scholar he neither went to University nor into a profession but in a sense into the family business, as a police officer in Burma from 1922 to 1927.

When he returned to England on leave he decided to abandon his job and dedicate himself to being a writer. The first five years of the attempt were extremely difficult, but he used his partially self-inflicted condition of poverty to provide the material for his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London, published in 1933. Not to embarrass his family and because he felt a need to distance himself his past, he chose to write under a pseudonym, choosing that most English of first names, George, and the name of a river in Suffolk, the Orwell, near where his parents were then living. During the 1930s, he became in terms of reputation a moderately successful novelist. His first novel, Burmese Days (1934), drew upon his experience as a policeman as did two essays, “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging” that have become among the most famous in the language. What was unusual in these writings was his pointing out the illegitimacy of imperialism without being at all sentimental–quite the contrary–about its victims. In rapid succession he wrote two further novels, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935) and Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Both of these, of which subsequently he was not particularly proud, explored the effects of poverty upon members of the middle class. He himself was barely surviving financially. He came to the attention of Victor Gollancz, a prominent publisher and founder of the Left Book Club. He commissioned Orwell to write a study of the effect of poverty in England. The result, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), was a powerful account of the ravages of the Depression. Contrary to the wishes of the Club, the book also included an autobiographical essay combining a critique of the failures of middle-class socialists with a rather romantic vision of the warmth and values of working-class life.

As a reporter, he went to Spain shortly after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The socialist world that he found in Barcelona so inspired him that he joined the militia of the POUM, a semi-Trotskyite group. When he returned to Barcelona later in the year he was caught up in the fighting of the “May Days” in which the Communists were trying to suppress those, including the POUM, to the left of them. After that, he was almost killed at the front when a bullet went through his throat. Again in Barcelona, he was lucky to get out of Spain without being arrested as a member of the POUM. Nevertheless, the experience of Spain made him committed to democratic socialism “as I understand it” as well as a dedicated anti-Communist. His magnificent account of his time in Spain, Homage to Catalonia (1938), received scant attention when it was published and did not achieve much of a readership until it was reissued in 1952 after his deat. Then he was much better known and it was a useful document in the Cold War. On his return to England after Spain, he published one more traditional novel, Coming Up for Air (1939), in which he contrasted the tawdry values of contemporary England with the quality of life earlier in the century.

His Spanish experience and his personal happiness in his marriage to Eileen O’Shaughnessy in 1936 ushered in the period in which he became a writer of his canonical essays and many shorter pieces. Although he never changed his name legally (remarking that he would then have to find another name to write under) he was known to those he met after Spain as “George Orwell.” With great skill, he now examined in sympathetic and insightful ways popular culture, such as his piece on Boys’ Weeklies and comic postcards. He also became a guardian of the language, most famously in “Politics and the English Language” (1946). With the outbreak of war, he committed himself both to patriotism and to socialism, that England must change dramatically politically while maintaining its traditional values. Both in terms of health and age, he could not serve in the military other than in the Home Guard. He worked for the British Broadcasting Corporation in its Talks Service to India and he became a regular columnist and literary editor for the socialist weekly, Tribune, writing a very successful series of columns, “As I Please.”

His ideas about how the Communists betrayed the socialist revolution bore fruit in his fable, Animal Farm (1945) that made him internationally famous. Four years later he published Nineteen Eighty-Four on the same theme. The central figure of the novel, Winston Smith, is employed to rewrite the past in order to make it conform to the ever changing political position of Airstrip One (Britain), part of Oceania, one of the three great powers in the world. He made permanent contributions to the language–terms too easily used, that he would have hated, as clichés–such as Big Brother, Thought Police, two plus two equals five, and indeed Orwellian. He conceived the book as a warning rather than as those on the right saw it as a prophecy.

Orwell died of tuberculosis in 1950. He and his wife had adopted a son but she died unexpectedly in 1945. He married Sonia Brownell in 1949. Of his traditional novels, Burmese Days is the best. All of his books of reportage are excellent, with Homage to Catalonia having great moral authority. Animal Farm is a gem. Nineteen Eighty-Four, though crude at times, has great power. He is one of the best essayists in the language, writing in the plain prose of the English tradition, being able to project both his personality and a sense of truth.

Like many an Englishman, Orwell had a great affection for the countryside where good things can happen, the “golden country” where love takes place in Nineteen Eighty-Four. He powerfully laments its degradation through his depiction of the pond now clogged with filth where George Bowling had fished as a child in Coming up for Air. In 1912 when his father retired the family moved to the rural town of Shiplake, outside of Henley. And he spent some years in a somewhat primitive country cottage in Wallington where he and his wife Eileen kept a small shop and raised a few animals. Under the influence of his investigations of the effects of the Depression in northern England, as eloquently written about in The Road to Wigan Pier, he was moving more to the left in his idiosyncratic way. He was intellectually and emotionally prepared to be overwhelmed by the socialist atmosphere of Barcelona when he arrived there on December 30, 1936 and decided that this was a society for which he must fight. Here he found the vision of an ideal of a socialist society. Whether he was accurate or not about what was actually going on in Spain is another matter. But that did not impair the power of the experience to give Orwell a sense of what might be possible in a truly egalitarian society. It is the wonderful vision of equality at the opening of Animal Farm when the animals had taken over. But even then there is the worm in the apple: the pigs have sequestered the milk for themselves. This raises the impossible to be resolved central question of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Can a true socialist society ever be achieved or is it always betrayed because of evil people and the seemingly inevitable drive that humans seem to have to try to attain power: ideals crumble before that force. Certainly Orwell did not believe that capitalism was the answer. In his wonderful wartime pamphlet, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), the heraldic beasts that support the royal arms, he argued, wrongly as it turned out, that a social revolution would be necessary if Britain were to win the war. There were social transformations, particularly in the Welfare State after the war, but far less than Orwell thought would be necessary. Despite his belief in its likelihood, no blood ran in the streets.

It was in Spain that he saw the importance of the creation of a socialist state. “I have seen wonderful things and at least really believed in Socialism, which I never did before.” And toward the end of his life he would write: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.” But as in Animal Farm, he also saw in Spain the betrayal of the revolution. He had joined the POUM militia, an arm of a semi-Trotskyist (represented by Snowball in Animal Farm) party that the Communists were determined to destroy, as ordered by Stalin (Napoleon, Stalin in Animal Farm). The Western powers would not assist the Republican Government of Spain and so the Soviet Union, other than a bit from Mexico, were the only suppliers to the Republic, paid for by Spanish gold that had been shipped to Moscow. Orwell recognized that the Communists were more efficient and indeed he had come to the decision to try to move from the POUM militia to join the Communist dominated International Brigade. But when he came to Barcelona to move forward on that decision he discovered that his comrades were being labeled traitors and that in the “May Days” there was fighting in Barcelona between the parties on the left. In such a situation there was no question on which side he would be: those who were loyal to the revolution even if it weren’t necessarily the most effective way to fight the war. He also saw in the reporting in the Press, the English Press very much included, how the truth was perverted, how the facts were rewritten in order to conform to the Communist line.

In the preface that he wrote for the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm in 1947 he made totally clear how important the experience in Spain was for the shaping of that book. “For the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement. On my return from Spain I thought of exposing the Soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by almost everyone and which could be easily translated into other languages. However, the actual details of the story did not come to me until one day (I was living in a small village) I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge cart-horse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that only if such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat. I proceeded to analyse Marx’s theory from the animals’ point of view. . . . I did not write it out until 1943, for I was always engaged on other work which gave me no time. . . . Thus the main outlines of the story were in my mind over a period of six years before it was actually written. . . . Although the various episodes are taken from the actual history of the Russian Revolution, they are dealt with schematically and their chronological order is changed: that was necessary for the symmetry of the story.”

How Animal Farm came to be published is a nicely paradoxical tale. The very factors that meant that it took two years to be issued were the same that eventually would lead to its great commercial success. Of course it was much helped by the brilliance of the writing, the creation of a totally believable fable, powerfully told with sharply etched characters, the villainous pigs, particularly Napoleon and Squealer, and the heroic horse Boxer and the cynical donkey, Benjamin, among others. Orwell is rather hard on those ordinarily beloved domestic animals, with a morally ambiguous cat and the vicious guard dogs. The manuscript was offered to several publishers but in 1943 the Soviet Union was an essential ally and to bring out a book that was clearly offensive to that country was hardly helpful for the war effort. Victor Gollancz who had published all his earlier novels and had edited a collection of essays, The Betrayal of the Left, to which Orwell had contributed, about the iniquity of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, was still sufficiently sympathetic to Russia during the war that he refused the book. Even the conservative T.S. Eliot turned it down for his firm, Faber & Faber, as not acceptable while the war was still on. Eventually Fredric Warburg, of Secker & Warburg, who had brought out the politically unpopular Homage to Catalonia, agreed to publish it. But even so it did not come out until August 1945 in England some months after the European war had ended in May. It was an extraordinary success, buoyed by its being a powerful argument against Russia, an early document of the Cold War. And in the United States, where it appeared the following year, it was a runaway best seller.

Animal Farm is in many ways a heartbreaking book. Virtually at the very beginning of what might be a truly just and equal society, it breaks down because of human selfishness, the pigs keeping back the milk, and the drive to power found in Napoleon. Orwell tells us that he is a socialist and yearns for a just society. But does he believe that it can actually ever happen? Might we have to make do with our deeply flawed capitalist yet to an extent democratic society? Might Winston Churchill’s remark that democracy was a terrible system but that it is better than any other have a certain validity? There is the poignant moment when the horse Clover is in despair over the execution of fellow animals: the purges. “As Clover looked down the hillside her eyes filled with tears. If she could have spoken her thoughts, it would have been to say that this was not what they had aimed at when they set themselves years ago to work for the overthrow of the human race. These scenes of terror and slaughter were not what they had looked forward to on that night when old Major first stirred them to rebellion. If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak, as she had protected the lost brood of ducklings with her foreleg on the night of Major’s speech.” Orwell saw as the only hope the “people” turning on their power mad rulers. How realistic a solution that is another matter. As he wrote to Dwight Macdonald, the American political essayist and Orwell’s publisher in the Partisan Review, about the book: “Of course I intended it primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution. But I did mean it to have a wider application in so much that I meant that that kind of revolution (violent conspiratorial revolution, led by unconsciously power-hungry people) can only lead to a change of masters. I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter had done their job.”

Orwell is a writer of extraordinary power and this may be his greatest masterpiece, a perfect text. It is in so many ways a despairing book but it has such compassion and empathy. There is still a glimmer that possibly some day we might create a better and equal society.

This foreword is taken from the new illustrated edition of Animal Farm published by Arion Press