More public-spirited pigs

[shewhomust]

From the British Library website, the rejection letter sent to George Orwell by Faber & Faber, declining to publish Animal Farm (with thanks to the Guardian for the transcription:

I think my own dissatisfaction with this apologue is that the effect is simply one of negation. It ought to excite some sympathy with what the author wants, as well as sympathy with his objections to something: and the positive point of view, which I take to be generally Trotskyite, is not convincing... And 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.

Signed: T.S. Eliot