EASYREEDER

The Never End: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, and the Origin of Animal Farm (Palgrave Macmillan)

Has George Orwell lost his saintly luster? In The Never End, rabble-rouser, dogged investigator, and consummate literary stylist John Reed collects two decades of subject-Orwell findings previously published in PANK, Guernica, Literary Hub, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The New York Press, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, and The Paris Review. Reed’s treatment of Orwell is corrective and peerlessly contemporary; he views Orwell in a twenty-first century global context, considering Orwell’s collaboration with Cold War intelligence operations—US and UK—with unfaltering objectivity. It’s hard to imagine that Orwell—in our own moment of global doublethink—wouldn’t have wanted his devotion to contrariety applied to the literary legacy he left behind. The Never End is at once a hatchet job and a celebration. Animal Farm, based on a previously unknown Russian short story? Animal Farm, deployed by the CIA, MI6 and the Congress for Cultural Freedom? Orwell, turning over blacklists in a McCarthy-esque act of betrayal? The Cold War? Does it last forever? Russia, the “Axis of Evil,” and now China? But. Orwell. Course syllabi. Literary laurels. Snitch. Why do we keep coming back? For the wrong reasons? Or because we know Old Benjamin would want us to know the truth? 

Published by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

3 Quarks Daily: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the Origin of Animal Farm: A Conversation between John Reed and Andrea Scrima

(10/23/2023)

Andrea Scrima: John, to start off with, I’d like to talk about this decades-long mission of yours to demystify George Orwell and shed light on his lesser-known political leanings and activities. One of the aims at the heart of this project, and your earlier book Snowball’s Chance, has been to reveal that Animal Farm does not, as has been generally claimed, describe the dangers of totalitarianism as such but rather the dangers of rebellion and revolution. In your new book The Never End, you delineate Animal Farm’s hidden agenda: to squelch any incipient rumblings of progressive reform. The message to readers on the Western front of the Cold War—and particularly schoolchildren, because Orwell’s books have been part of the standard curriculum for over seventy years—has been that revolution, even when it’s unleashed not by the rabble-rousing mob but by the educated class, and for all the right reasons—is, due to our flawed human nature, doomed to failure. Meaning: better to maintain a status quo that is admittedly less than ideal than risk chaos.

It reminds me of that moment shortly after the pandemic hit when a mood of hope began to spread: nature had finally struck back, and humanity was recognizing the stark truth of its situation: that to survive, it would have to scale back virtually everything we associate with modern life and reduce the monster of production to a minimum. Suddenly, it was like getting a fleeting glimpse through a veil: the late-capitalist system of forever war we’re living in was created by humans and can therefore be changed by humans; it was possible to shift course, we just had to take responsibility and start. In retrospect, it’s sad to see how quickly the revolutionary power in that insight gave way to fear and resignation as we obeyed the powers that be and waited for the vaccinations that would save us—but for a moment there, our collective situation, and our collective power to change it, had become briefly, startlingly clear.

And so it seems to me that you’re looking at the great force arising out of hope—and why it’s essential for those in power to snuff it out as early as possible. What bearing does this have today?…

John Reed with Tiffany Troy

(04/24)

Tiffany Troy (Rail): We begin The Never End with “The Never End,” where you contrast your perfunctorily factual approach towards Orwell studies versus the whitewashing by Christopher Hitchens. In what ways does the creative paradigm of the writer as hero shape The Never End?

John Reed: You’re so right to call this out. When I was in graduate school this idea of the “artist as hero,” that Joycean Stephen Hero, was still very much in vogue. I expect there’s still some of that today, but there’s been some erosion, and in the case of questionable behavior, massive erosion. I’ve never been able to forgive Picasso, for example, or Lucian Freud. In the early aughts, the monstrous stuff they pulled was cocktail party conversation, but no more; now, it’s in the footnotes, and it’s a necessary part of the conversation. As it should be.

Rail: How do you position yourself as someone who has shaped Orwell studies?

Reed: I feel really bashful about this question. What a grandiloquent thing to think or say! But I do think I had some impact here. Not because I was the only one who saw it, but somehow because I was cast in the role. Central casting? Maybe. But even so, the research that I looked at and benefited from resulted from massive academic and cultural collaboration; even the brand new stuff we discovered. I couldn’t have done without other people; the indefatigable Anna Fridlis, my research assistant, was invaluable to me, and certainly the translation of “Animal Riot” was due to a wealth of intelligence from Tanya Paperny.

Reed makes and impeccable case. … The Never End is essential. —Zoe Berkovitz, Rain Taxi

Readers fascinated with George Orwell’s Animal Farm will want to make The Never End: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the Origin of Animal Farm a “must read.” … Reed raises some intriguing questions. These strike at the heart of not just literary tradition and a revered figure of revolution, but the process by which literature connects to political institutions and special interests who would deploy it as yet another opportunity for social influence and change. Surveying issues of “selling out” and supporting a system or sparking the kinds of change that lead to shifts in social and political reality, Reed offers a wide-ranging discussion that delves into history and social order as deeply as it draws together links between disparate lines of thought and different disciplines. —Diane Donovan, Midwest Book Review

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, ideas that had been germinating suddenly coalesced, and in three weeks’ time Reed penned a parody of George Orwell’s Animal Farm. The memorable pig Snowball would return from exile, bringing capitalism with him—thus updating the Cold War allegory by fifty-some years and pulling the rug out from underneath it. … Orwell’s writing had long been used as a propaganda tool, and evidence had emerged that his political leanings went far beyond defaming communism—but if facing this basic historical truth was so unthinkable, what was the taboo preventing us from seeing? Reed’s examination of our Orwell preoccupation sifts through the changes the West has undergone since the Cold War: its cultural crises, its military disasters, its self-deceptions and confusions, and more recently—perhaps even more troubling—its new instability of identity. —Andrea Scrima, 3Quarks

Reed has captured the state of the farm today. —The Fort Myers News-Press

A dizzying feat of writing and scholarship. —Lynne Tillman

One plays this terrifying guessing game of animal a clef: which animal am I? Which animal is my neighbor? —Jonathan Ames

A pig returns to the farm, thumbing his snout at Orwell … the world had a new evil to deal with, and it was not communism. —The New York Times

Snowball, now a capitalist pig, returns to the farm and transforms it into Animal Fair, a garish, polluting theme park, financed by a company called Henron.  —Money Magazine

One of the keenest thinkers of our time. —PopMatters