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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, 11. the wind in the willows 107 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...

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