not more communism but more public-spirited pigs

Truly the parallel and overlapping paths of history are fascinating. Just this morning, I read a juicy little tidbit that note that T.S. Eliot himself wrote the rejection letter to George Orwall re.: the publication of Animal Farm.

From the letter (recently made public):

"We have no conviction that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the current time,” wrote Eliot, adding that he thought its “view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing”.

Eliot wrote: “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.”

Fantastic.

Later, Animal Farm was published by Secker & Warburg, and since then has gone on to be a triumph of 20th Century Literature.