WILLIAM PHILLIPS
183
who was also a consultant, brought a number of books by new writers
that were ignored by most publishers, who had not caught up with the
modem scene. I recommended
Animal Farm
to the editor of Dial Press,
whose name I have forgotten.
The verdict was given to me in the men's room, where we both
happened to be at the same time. "Nobody," he said, "wants to read
books about animals." I replied that books about horses seemed to sell.
Later, in his spacious office, as he was seated behind an enormous oak
desk, I tried to explain to the editor, who had a self-assured air of impor–
tance, that
Animal Farm
was a political book. I also tried to get him to
understand that it was a political satire of the totalitarian system in the So–
viet Union. But he had in his mind a fixed image of the book as a story
about animals.
Of course, Dial Press lost not only an important book but also a great
deal of money. So did
I.
For, in addition to a retainer, the arrangement
was that I was to receive one percent of the sales price of books we rec–
ommended. Millions of copies of
Animal Farm
have since been sold, and
it has been translated into seventy-two languages. And along with it went
the rights to 1984.
Perhaps I should not be too hard on the Dial editor, since, as I recall,
twenty-three publishers rejected
Animal Farm,
before it was finally put
out by Harcourt Brace. Who knows how much was due to incompe–
tence and how much to anti-anti-Communism? Perhaps a combination
of both. At any rate, it was a reversal of the accepted idea of the relation
of money to politics.
Several years later, when I was in London, I saw Orwell in the hos–
pital, not long before he died. Lying in bed, and apparently not able to
get up, he still was very impressive. He asked detailed questions about
Partisan Review
and about specific writers whose works he had apparently
read and whose careers he had followed. He was also in high spirits and
very alert for a man as sick as he was. He was amused, not bitter, about
the rejections of
Animal Farm.
He plied me with endless, knowledgeable
questions about the state of culture and politics in America. I was quite
pessimistic at the time, and though Orwell had an optimistic personality,
he too was gloomy about the state of the world.
Too bad he did not live to see how successful and influential his
books would become.
w.
P.
