Orwell

by Jeffrey Meyers

  Orwell states that Axis “propaganda has no other purpose than to deceive, [though] it is often possible to infer the real intentions which it conceals.” In January 1942 the Germans admitted that the Russian town of Mojaisk “had fallen, but declared that it was a town of no importance, though they had said just the contrary when they occupied it themselves.” But the BBC propaganda and censorship also tested Orwell's integrity. He found it particularly difficult to describe the American defeat at Corregidor as a “long delaying action in the Philippines which has held up the Japanese attack on Australia,” to justify the arrests of Gandhi and Nehru, to praise the “wise and large-minded” speeches of Stalin, who claimed he had no wish to subjugate anybody (Stalinists had tried to kill Orwell in Spain). Orwell's broadcasts do not show, as West argues, “how strongly he believed in what he was doing.” On the contrary, they demonstrate why he became disgusted and finally quit his work at the BBC.

  Orwell's job was quite similar to Winston Smith's work at the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and (as West points out) his experiences and observations at the wartime BBC had a significant influence on that novel. In Nineteen Eighty-Four there are also banners and slogans on May Day, mass meetings in Trafalgar (“Victory”) Square, severe rationing and equalitarian austerity, vast populations stupefied by propaganda and constantly prepared for bad news, a world dominated by superpowers who are always at war with each other but always changing alliances. “The biggest example of such a change,” Orwell writes, “was when the Germans invaded Russia [in 1941]. Up to this moment, they exploited their pretended friendship [pact] with Russia for all it was worth, and described themselves as the allies of a socialist country fighting against plutocracy. They had no sooner invaded Russia than they began to describe themselves as the defenders of European civilization against Bolshevism.”

  ELEVEN

  THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS

  A New Source for Animal Farm

  The first editor to read my most recent essay complained that Orwell never mentioned Kenneth Grahame as a source for Animal Farm. If he had, the source would have been obvious. It was much more difficult to discover a source—in a most charming and delightful book—that no one (including myself) had ever noticed. Orwell borrowed many elements from Grahame's beast fable. But, unlike Grahame, he gives his animals disagreeable human qualities. Though both fables are counter-revolutionary, Grahame is a contented Conservative, Orwell a disillusioned Socialist.

  I

  The lucid, witty and ironic beast fables, The Wind in the Willows (1908) and Animal Farm (1945), are two of the most popular books of the twentieth century, but no one (including myself, in four works on George Orwell) has seen how extensively Kenneth Grahame's work influenced Orwell's. Both books are too subtly allusive and politically sophisticated for children to understand fully. Grahame's riverine Toad, Rat, Mole and Badger are matched by Orwell's barnyard pigs, horses, donkeys and goats. Both sets of characters are attacked by their own kind: Grahame's by weasels and stoats, Orwell's by the ferocious police dogs of the pigs. The animals in both books are threatened by human beings: Grahame's repressive policemen and harsh magistrates, violent barge-woman, brutes who keep pets and trap otters; Orwell's Farmer Jones, Farmer Pilkington, the invader Frederick and the driver of the knacker's van that carts away the exhausted horse Boxer. The Wind in the Willows is a children's book with another level of meaning that adults can savor. Animal Farm is not for children, but uses Grahame's simplicity of characters and plot to create a compelling political allegory.

  No editor, at first, wanted to publish Wind in the Willows or Animal Farm. Everybody's magazine, Grahame's usual bolt hole, refused to serialize it and John Lane of Bodley Head, who'd published his previous books, rejected it. Only the personal intervention of President Theodore Roosevelt persuaded Scribner's to bring it out in America. When Methuen finally accepted it in Britain, a misguided friend of Grahame's, who either misread the fable or wanted everyone else to do so, advised him to deny its essential content and meaning. “Don't you think that Methuen himself,” he wrote, “in his preliminary announcement of the book, should mention that it is not a political skit, or an Allegory … or a Social Satire?” Contemporary reviewers, blinded by its originality, missed the point entirely. The Times wrote with a straight face, as if it were a science textbook, “As a contribution to natural history, the work is negligible.” T. P.'s Weekly, ignoring the comedy and fantasy, agreed that the numerous incidents “will win no credence from the very best authorities on biology.”

  Animal Farm was rejected by five leading British publishers. T. S. Eliot, at Faber, who saw nothing wrong with the pigs taking charge since they were the most intelligent animals and best qualified to run the farm, was unwilling to publish what he thought was a Trotskyist criticism of a wartime Russian ally. It was also refused by about twenty American publishers, including one, oblivious to the political allegory of the Russian Revolution, who explained that “it was impossible to sell animal stories in the USA.” Orwell was preparing to publish it himself when Fredric Warburg finally accepted it. When the anti-Stalinist fable appeared, all the Communist and fellow-traveling reviewers attacked it. Both books, with their pristine style and charming tenderness, have sold millions and millions of copies.

  The characters in The Wind in the Willows (whose title echoes Yeats’ The Wind Among the Reeds, 1898) combine both animal and human traits. They refer to each other as animals (not men). They resemble animals in their physical appearance, though Toad's webbed toes are called paws; in their acute sense of smell; and in their subterranean housing, perfectly suited to their characters and needs (they're all terribly thorough about their crevice and burrow). But their most important qualities are human and they lead their own individual lives. They stand upright on two legs; speak to each other, using schoolboy slang and abusive epithets; wear clothes (with their tails sticking out behind); eat bountiful, skin-stretching, even gourmet continental meals, while sitting at tables with knives and forks; have furniture and a panoply of possessions; keep servants; control huge horses; own farm animals and caged birds; study maps and read books; sing songs and write poetry; love being comfy and cozy, tidy and snug; enjoy, after fatiguing activity, a well earned repose, with slippered feet raised in front of a blazing fire. They have human tastes, habits, reason and morals, and (except for Toad) believe they must behave properly and respect the law.

  Though the leading characters are free-ranging bachelors, all the children in the story are dutiful, well behaved and subservient to the prevailing class system. The lost, lower-class hedgehogs, who turn up at Badger's well furnished sett, respectfully swing their caps and obsequiously touch their forelocks. The little field-mice obediently form a semi-circle and squeak out Christmas carols in the cold night air. The young Portly—a rotund, elderly name for a sleek young otter—disappears on a mild escapade, but is soon found and willingly returns home.

  The blunt, unsocial Badger, the reflective yearning-to-wander Rat and the mild, inquiring Mole are all contrasted to the flamboyant and reckless Toad. Like real amphibians, Toad loves to puff up and inflate himself. It's significant—since Grahame's son Alastair, the first to hear the story, was born blind in one eye and with a squint in the other—that Grahame ignores Mole's natural blindness and life spent in darkness, and emphasizes instead his normal desire to see the world.

  Rat, Mole and Badger, with no visible means of support and no need to work, have sufficient funds to pay for their simple way of life. Toad has inherited a considerable fortune and lives in rather grand, even ostentatious style. Good-natured and hospitable, popular and debonair, he's also intolerably boastful and conceited in a very un-English and simply-not-done way. He can't be left to himself and requires persistent and sometimes forcible restraint. When opposed, his favorite word is “Shan't.”

  Toad, quickly tiring of old fads, becomes possessed by new and increasingly rapid crazes: from a boat rowed by a man to a caravan drawn by a hor
se to a car driven by a motor. His mobile obsessions recall the turn-of-the-century passion for bicycles of Grahame's contemporaries, Shaw, Kipling and Wells; and the craze for motor-cars of Conrad, Wharton and Henry James. Conrad's obsession, which ranged from a 4.5-horsepower Dion to a Daimler that had once belonged to the Duke of Connaught, amounted—like Toad's—to auto-eroticism.

  The novel is structured by a series of contrasts: between Wild Wood and river, land and water, cars and boats, stability and movement, stasis and change, restraint and freedom, reality and fantasy; between honest and devious, proper and reckless, law-abiding and felonious, solitary and social, cold and warm, messy and tidy, getting lost and coming home. The happy return home had a strong appeal to lonely school-boarders. The book is also unified by recurrent patterns as Toad suddenly shifts from pride to humility, escape to capture, reformation to relapse. Mole and Toad both hide inside the hollow of a tree; Toad steals two cars and also appropriates a horse; Toad and Rat are both violently constrained; Toad escapes from his house and from prison; Toad and Mole disguise themselves in washerwoman's clothing; Toad twice arranges the chairs in his room, and sings two self-enhancing songs; the weasels and Toad's friends feast during elaborate banquets in the Hall; Toad loses Toad Hall and finally regains it.

  Modern writers found rivers threatening. Eliot wrote of the Mississippi: “I think that the river / Is a strong brown god.” Conrad described the Congo River snaking into the heart of darkness and said that even the Thames “has been one of the dark places on the earth.” Grahame's river—a stream, really—has no fearful predators. Apart from a few unexpected sinkings and dunkings, it is benign and secure. Echoing the famous Victorian lines on the Balliol don Benjamin Jowett—“I am the Master of this college: / What I don't know isn't knowledge”—Rat says of the river: “What it hasn't got is not worth having, and what it doesn't know is not worth knowing.”

  The real menaces are the polluting, noisy and destructive machines: steam launches in the river, threshing machines in the fields and motor-cars in the road. The premonitory “Poop-poop!” of the cars, which “wailed like an uneasy animal in pain,” suggests the sound of the engine, the beep of the horn and, in baby-talk, the word for excrement. The sudden onrush of the car frightens the placid horse, plunges the passengers into a ditch and completely destroys the colorful caravan.

  Instead of warning Toad, the accident inspires him to purchase his own automobile. After he's had a number of smash-ups and regrettable encounters with the constabulary, Badger—sounding like Sherlock Holmes summoning Watson, or Professor Van Helsing calling his cohorts to track down Dracula—confidently tells Rat and Mole, “You two animals will accompany me instantly to Toad Hall, and the work of rescue shall be accomplished.” They duly capture Toad, forbid him to drive and confine him to quarters.

  In the most fascinating scene in the book, Toad indulges himself in a compensatory experience:

  When his violent paroxysms possessed him he would arrange bedroom chairs in rude resemblance of a motor car and would crouch on the foremost of them, bent forward and staring fixedly ahead making uncouth and ghastly noises, till the climax was reached, when, turning a complete somersault, he would lie prostrate amidst the ruins of the chairs, apparently satisfied for the moment.

  Lois Kuznets, expressing the critical consensus in her Twayne-series book on Grahame, confidently asserts that “the animal characters are burdened by neither sexual longings nor professional ambitions.”

  But Toad's “violent paroxysms ” (an odd word in a children's story) take place in his solitary bedroom as he crouches on a chair, as if mounting a woman during the sexual act, and makes “ghastly noises” till he reaches a climax, lies prostrate and is finally satisfied. This unmistakable portrayal of masturbation and orgasm foreshadows D. H. Lawrence's “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (1926), in which the little boy's sexual release while furiously riding his toy horse enables him to predict the winner of real horse races and provide money for his extravagant family.

  Forbidden to drive, Toad escapes through the window of his room and steals a convenient car. He inevitably cracks it up, is tried in court and harshly sentenced to twenty years in prison. In a scene that imitates Lucy Lockit helping Captain Macheath to escape from prison in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), the jailer's good-hearted daughter (the only kind human being in the book) helps Toad escape by arranging a change of clothes with the official washerwoman. The transvestite Toad passes, most improbably, for an old woman. He makes his way to the nearest railway station, but when he tries to buy a ticket, he's horrified to discover that “he had left both coat and waistcoat behind him in his cell, and with them his pocket-book, money, keys, watch, matches, pencil-case—all that makes life worth living.” Without these un-natural, materialistic props, Toad sets out on foot and finds himself in the worst sort of hole: “in an unknown wood, with no money and no chance of supper, and still far from friends and home.”

  Rat, by contrast, has embarked on a very different sort of adventure. Inspired by the travel-liars tales of the peregrinating Water Rat—who echoes the theme of Robert Louis Stevenson's “Ordered South” (1881) and of John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale: “O for a beaker full of the warm South” (1819)—Rat “filled his glass with the red and glowing vintage of the South.” Changing his mind about his habitat, Rat now wants to leave his beloved river and, like Toad, must be restrained by Mole until he comes to his senses.

  At the start of the book Rat warned Mole that they could not trust the weasels who live in the dangerous Wild Wood. While Toad is confined in prison and then flees his pursuers, the weasels and stoats, armed to the fangs, stealthily occupy Toad Hall. They lie in bed half the day, breakfast late, get drunk, are shockingly untidy and leave the place a mess. While in possession of Toad Hall, they create a new class system. As one of the stoats complains to the disguised Mole, who's made a foray into enemy territory: “That's just like the weasels; they're to stop comfortably in the banqueting-hall, and have feasting and toasts and songs and all sorts of fun, while we must stay on guard in the cold and the dark.” Feasting at a big banquet on the Chief Weasel's birthday, unarmed and unsuspecting, they leave themselves vulnerable to attack.

  Taking advantage of the lapse in vigilance, Badger and the animals arm themselves for battle: “First, there was a belt to go round each animal, and then a sword to be stuck into each belt, and then a cutlass on the other side to balance it. Then a pair of pistols, a policeman's truncheon, several sets of handcuffs, some bandages and sticking-plaster, and a flask and a sandwich-case.” The excessive weaponry and incongruous supplies (which might impair their ability to fight) are amusing. The cavalier's sword is balanced by the pirate's cutlass and then superfluously compounded, since they have only two paws, by the more modern pistols. Since Toad, for once, is on the right side of law and order, they add a policeman's baton and handirons. Finally, they carry medical supplies in case of wounds, grub in case of hunger.

  The final provocation is the Chief Weasel's song, delivered in a high, squeaky voice. He mocks the bachelor-owner of the premises by echoing the anonymous nursery rhyme, “A frog he would a-wooing go,” with “Toad he went a-pleasuring.” Badger chooses this opportune moment to attack the drunken gluttons and retake the Hall. Grahame clearly states his political message (contra his friend's advice) on the penultimate page: “After this climax, the four animals continued to lead their lives, so rudely broken in upon by civil war, in great joy and contentment, undisturbed by further risings or invasions.” The novel ends as the mother weasels warn their children that if they don't behave “the terrible grey Badger would up and get them.” The hero of the battle of Toad Hall, like the weasels who once threatened the peaceful animals on the river, becomes demonized by his former enemies.

  II

  Orwell was five years old when The Wind in the Willows was published. That delightful work made perfect childhood reading, and he shared Grahame's love of the peaceful Thames Valley. The her
o of his novel Coming Up For Air (1939), like Grahame's characters, longs to escape from the harsh realities of contemporary life and tries to recover the lost Eden of his Edwardian childhood. Both authors believed, with Bertrand Russell, that anyone born after 1914 has never known real happiness. Choosing carefully and covertly, Orwell borrowed and absorbed many elements of Grahame's beast fable. Toad, after escaping from his house, has breakfast at the Red Lion inn. Orwell tips his hand and slyly hints at his source when Farmer Jones drinks at the Red Lion inn.

  Grahame's Rat and Orwell's pig Minimus write poetry. Like Rat, Orwell's pig Snowball was best at expository writing and, precariously balancing himself on a ladder, writes the soon to be traduced Seven Commandments on a wall. Toad, like Orwell's animals, loves to burst into song, and his “Last Little Song” meagerly compensates for the narcissistic speech he's forbidden to give at his banquet. Toad's song praises himself; Minimus’ song praises the dictatorial pig, Napoleon. Grahame's characters use schoolboy slang; Orwell's pigs simplify and parody Marxist ideology.

  In Grahame, machines wreak havoc on the river, the fields and the roads. In Orwell, the disappointing electrical windmill is built and, like Toad's cars, destroyed: first by a raging gale and then by the invasion of Frederick. Grahame's animals arm themselves before recapturing Toad Hall. Orwell's pig Napoleon urges the animals “to procure firearms and train themselves in the use of them.”