My wacky filing system again…and tucked inside Orwell’s tiny book was “Farm to Fable,” a
short review from September 7, 1946. Given I was three then, how to explain the date and
having this review by Edmund Wilson. Ah, yes, I’d saved it from The New Yorker’s September
4 th, 2023 issue. Who was Edmund Wilson? The premier literary critic in America for forty
Years and The New Yorker’s principal book reviewer. He wrote widely on the Soviet Union, so
no surprise he was asked to review Orwell’s fable in 1946. I quote Wilson’s second sentence
in his review. Who, I ask, is allowed this length today?
“If you are told that the story deals with a group of cows, horses, pigs, sheep, and poultry which decide to expel their master and run his farm for themselves but eventually turn into something almost indistinguishable from human beings, with the pigs as a superior caste exploiting the other animals very much as the farmer did, and if you hear that Stalin figures as a pig named Napoleon and Trotsky as a pig named Snowball, you may not think it sounds particularly promising. But the truth is that it is absolutely first-rate.” The review is only two paragraphs, in which Wilson describes Orwell’s prose as plain and spare (unlike his own) and “admirably roportioned to his purpose.” Wilson then compares Orwell’s fable to Voltaire and Swift’s satire.
Enjoyable and enlightening to reread Animal Farm this week, along with Colm Tóibín’s The
Magician, a novel about the German writer, Thomas Mann. The book is 498 pages and effortless reading. Permissible voyeurism, I call it! A reader begins in 1891 in Lübeck, Germany, and continues with Thomas all the way to 1950 in Los Angeles, California.
I turned down the corner of page 196 in chapter 7, Munich, 1922. Why? Because of its relevance now. Mann agrees to deliver a lecture, “An Appeal to Reason,” at the Beethovensaal
in Berlin. He assumes his audience deplores the turning away from principles of a civilized
society, that they will despise “the gigantic wave of barbarism, the primitive populist fairground barking, and will reject a politics of the grotesque, replete with reflexive mass paroxysms, amusement park chiming, cries of hallelujah and mantra-like repetitions of monotonous slogans until everyone foams at the mouth.” Mann describes Nazism as “a colossus with clay feet.” That’s when a man in the audience stands and demands to be heard. He calls Mann a liar and an enemy of the people; and soon dissenters all over the hall shout abuse and catcalls. “It was clear they were organized.” That evening Thomas Mann understands he will never be able to speak in Germany again. There’s something happening, Mr. Mann, and now… you know what it is. Remember Bob Dylan’s song about Mr. Jones, who doesn’t know what “it” is. Can you hear the tune and sing the words?
Both Thomas Mann and Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize for Literature. What do you have
to say about that, Mr. and Ms. Jones? To be continued…
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