Snowball's Chance Read online
PRAISE FOR JOHN REED
AND SNOWBALL’S CHANCE
“While reading Snowball’s Chance, one plays this terrifying guessing game of animal á clef: which animal am I? Which animal is my neighbor? Which animal is my enemy? Written in lucid, wise, funny, fable-prose, this book brings to mind Spiegelman’s Maus—the use of a playful metaphor to reveal truths we might otherwise refuse to see.”
—JONATHAN AMES
“A writer of great promise.”
—PAUL AUSTER
“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 estate of George Orwell is not happy about it.”
—DINITIA SMITH, NEW YORK TIMES
“[Reed] not only shanghais Orwell’s story, but amps up and mocks the writer’s famously flat, didactic style—that fairytailish simplicity that has ensured Animal Farm a place in high school English classes for the last 50 years.”
—JOHN STRAUSBAUGH,
NEW YORK PRESS
“Reed is an extraordinary talent.”
—FRAN GORDON
“Snowball’s Chance parodies Orwell’s Animal Farm, dragging it kicking and screaming into the 21st century.”
—ED NAWOTKA,
PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY
“Reed has managed to take a dated masterpiece … and revive it for the odd, casino-like social and political world we’re mired in today; in the process he’s created his own masterpiece.”
—CREATIVE LOAFING (CHARLOTTE)
“John Reed excels in the realm of the strange.”
—SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
“Reed’s tale, crafted amid ground zero’s dust, is chilling in its clarity and inspired in its skewering of Orwell’s stilted style. Whether you liked or loathed the original, there’s no denying Reed has captured the state of the farm today.”
—FORT MYERS NEWS-PRESS
“Eerie in its timeliness.”
—RAIN TAXI
“A caustically brilliant satire … as brainy as it is base, destructive as it is innovative and sweeping as it is sophisticated.”
—LOS ANGELES JOURNAL
SNOWBALL’S CHANCE
JOHN REED was born in 1969 in New York City and raised in the vacant Tribeca of the late 1970s and early 80s. He studied fiction at Columbia University, earning a Fellowship of Citation. On September 13, 2001, the windows and vents of his downtown apartment taped up to prevent the dust from the World Trade Center from seeping in, Reed had a revelation: Snowball returns to the farm to introduce capitalism. In a whirlwind three weeks, Reed drafted Snowball’s Chance, a novel that would spark a literary debate about parody and canonical writing, fuel an ongoing conflagration about George Orwell and his late-life involvement with Mccarthy-esque investigations of British communists, and hold a place on the SPD “Small Press” bestseller list for the next decade. His other books include the novels A Still Small Voice and The Whole, a play, All the World’s a Grave, and the non-fiction Tales of Woe. He has also developed original, award-winning programming for MTV and other networks. He is a member of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle and a senior editor at The Brooklyn Rail.
ALEXANDER COCKBURN, The Nation’s “Beat the Devil” columnist and one of America’s best-known radical journalists, was born in Scotland and grew up in Ireland. He is co-editor, with Jeffrey St Clair, of CounterPunch and the author of many books.
JAMES SHERRY is the author of ten books of poetry and prose and founder of the Segue Foundation, a multi-arts publishing and presenting organization that has made a deep impact on downtown Manhattan culture, and Roof Books, which first published Snowball’s Chance.
THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY
I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much. —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET
SNOWBALL’S CHANCE
First published in 2002 by Roof Books, part of the Segue Foundation
© 2002, 2012 John Reed
Introduction © Alexander Cockburn, 2002
Afterword © James Sherry, 2012
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com
eISBN: 978-1-61219-126-3
Library of Congress Control Number: 2012943922
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Epigraph
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword: The Fable of the Weasel
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Afterword
FOREWORD
THE FABLE OF THE WEASEL
BY ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Snowball’s Chance takes its intriguing departure from Animal Farm, and set me thinking again about Orwell. These days I can’t get through almost any page of Orwell without a shudder, though in my teens I often had the Penguin selection of his essays in my pocket. I’d learned to loathe Animal Farm earlier at my prep school, Heatherdown, where any arguments for socialism would be met with brays of “and some are more equal than others” by my school mates.
Some writers admired in adolescence stay around for the rest of the journey, perennial sources of refreshment and uplift: P.G. Wodehouse, Stanley Weyman, H.L. Mencken, Flann O’Brien, to name but four I’d be glad to find in any bathroom. Now, why can Mencken delight me still, while the mere sight of a page of Orwell carries me back to memories of England and of British-ness at full disagreeable stretch: philistine, vulgar, thuggish, flag-wagging?
Maybe the answer comes with the flag-wagging. Mencken made terrible errors of political judgement. Like Orwell he could be a lout. Both men’s prose has excited awful imitators. But Mencken was a true outsider. Orwell wasn’t. To step into Mencken-land is to be lured down a thousand unexpected pathways, with firecrackers of wit exploding under one’s feet. Contradicting Thomas Love Peacock’s famous jibe at landscapers, even on the twentieth tour of the Mencken estate there are surprises. I don’t feel that, trundling through Orwell Country. It gets less alluring with each visit. What once seemed bracing, now sounds boorish. How quickly one learns to loathe the affectations of plain bluntishness. The man of conscience turns out to be a whiner, and of course a snitch, an informer to the secret police, Animal Farm’s resident weasel.
When Orwell’s secret denunciations surfaced a few years ago, there was a medium-level commotion. Then, with the publication of Peter Davison’s maniacally complete twenty-volume collected Orwell, the topic of Orwell as government snitch flared again, with more lissome apologies for St. George from the liberal/left and bellows of applause from cold warriors, taking the line that if Orwell, great hero of the non-Communist left, named names, then that provides moral cover for all the Namers of Names who came after him.
Those on the non-Com left rushed to shore up St. George’s reputation.
Some emphasized Orwell’s personal feeling toward Kirwan. The guy was in love. Others argued that Orwell was near death’s door, traditionally a time for confessionals. Others insisted that Orwell didn’t really name names, and anyway (this was the late Ian Hamilton in the London Review of Books), “he was forever making lists,”—a fishing log—a log of how many eggs his hens laid; so why not a snitch list?
“Orwell named no names and disclosed no identities,” proclaimed Christopher Hitchens, one of Orwell’s most ecstatic admirers. Clearly, Orwell did both, as in “Parker, Ralph. Underground member and close FT [fellow traveler?] Stayed on in Moscow. Probably careerist.”
Apologists for Orwell sometimes suggest this was a sort of parlor game between Rees and Orwell, playful scribbles that somehow ended up with Kirwan. The facts are otherwise. Orwell carefully and secretly remitted to Celia Kirwan, an agent of the IRD or Information Research Department, a list of the names of persons on the left who he deemed security risks, as Communists or fellow travelers. The IRD was lodged in the British Foreign Office but in fact over-seen by the Secret Intelligence Service, otherwise known as MI6.
Kirwan, with whom Orwell had previously had some sort of liaison, visited Orwell in Cranham on March 29, 1949. She reported to the Department the next day that she “had discussed some aspects of our work with him in great confidence, and he was delighted to learn of them.” Case Officer Lt. Colonel Sheridan annotated this report.
On April 6, a week later, Orwell wrote to his friend Richard Rees, asking him to find and send “a quarto notebook with a pale bluish cardboard cover” containing “a list of list of crypto-Communists and fellow-travellers which I want to bring up to date.” Rees duly dispatched the notebook and Orwell wrote on May 2 to Kirwan, “I enclose a list with about 35 names,” modestly adding that “I don’t suppose it will tell your friends anything they don’t know,” and reflecting that, although the IRD probably had tabs on the subjects already, “it isn’t a bad idea to have people who are probably unreliable listed.”
Reviewing this sequence in the London Review of Books early in 2000, Perry Anderson emphasized some important points. Orwell knew the destination of the list, and “was very anxious to keep the list hidden.” It remains thus. Though 99 names from the notebook are displayed in Vol. XX of Orwell’s Collected Works, with another 36 withheld by the editor for fear of libel, the list of 35 remains a state secret, lodged in the Foreign Office archives.
Those secret advisories to an IRD staffer had consequences. Blacklists usually do. No doubt the list was passed on in some form to American intelligence that made due note of those listed as fellow travelers and duly proscribed them under the McCarran Act.
Hitchens has written softly of Orwell’s “tendresse” for Kirwan, as though love rather than loyalty led him forward. Against the evidence under our noses he insists Orwell “wasn’t interested in unearthing heresy or in getting people fired or in putting them under the discipline of loyalty oath.” Although as opposed to the mellow tendresse for secret agent Kirwan, he had “an acid contempt for the Communists who had betrayed their cause and their country once before and might do so again.”
Here Orwell would surely have given a vigorous nod. Orwell’s defenders claim that he was only making sure the wrong sort of person wasn’t hired by the Foreign Office to write essays on the British ways of life. But Orwell made it clear to the IRD he was identifying people who were “unreliable” and who, worming their way into organizations like the British Labor Party, “might be able to do enormous mischief.” Loyalty was the issue, and it’s plain enough from his annotations that Orwell thought that Jews, blacks, and homosexuals had an inherent tropism towards treachery to the values protected by the coalition of patriots including himself and the IRD. G.D.H. Cole, Orwell noted, was “shallow,” a “sympathizer” and also a “diabetic.”
There seems to be general agreement by Orwell’s fans left and right, to skate gently over these Orwellian suspicions of Jews, homosexuals, and blacks, also the extreme ignorance of his assessments, reminiscent of police intelligence files the world over. Of Paul Robeson Orwell wrote, “very anti-white. [Henry] Wallace supporter.” Only a person who instinctively thought all blacks were anti-white could have written this piece of stupidity. One of Robeson’s indisputable features, consequent upon his intellectual disposition and his connections with the Communists, was that he was most emphatically not “very anti-white,” Ask the Welsh coal miners for whom Robeson campaigned.
If any other postwar intellectual was suddenly found to have written mini-diatribes about blacks, homosexuals, and Jews, we can safely assume that subsequent commentary would not have been forgiving. There was certainly no forgivenness for Mencken. But Orwell gets a pass. “Deutscher [Polish Jew],” “Driberg, Tom. English Jew,” “Chaplin, Charles (Jewish?).” No denunciations from the normally sensitive Norman Podhoretz.
When someone becomes a saint, everything is mustered as testimony to his holiness. So it is with St. George and his list. Thus, in 1998, when the list became an issue, we have fresh endorsement of all the cold war constructs as they were shaped in the immediate postwar years, when the cold war coalition from right to left signed on to fanatical anti-Communism. The IRD, disabled in the seventies by a Labor Foreign Minister on the grounds it was a sinkhole of rightwing nuts, would have been pleased.
Orwell’s Animal Farm is a powerful fable, though as I’ve noted, in my experience, the effect of the fable has mostly been to deride the utopian impulse. Orwell as Weasel is a powerful fable too, as powerful as the awful saga of betrayal conducted by that other Cold War saint, Ignacio Silone. “The Fable of the Weasel” is cautionary, not least about defenders of Orwell’s conduct. If they thought what he did was okay, or even better than okay, somehow an act of sublime bravery, should one not assume that they regard snitching against Traitors to the West as a moral duty too. We have been warned. John Reed’s parody in Snowball’s Chance warns us too, how the non-Com side plays on Orwell’s very field.
Alexander Cockburn
Petrolia, California
July, 2002
I
THE OLD PIGS WERE DYING. FIRST, IT WAS Dominicus—a secondary functionary who had given over his life to that rather crucial task of interpreting and graphing statistical data. He wore black-rimmed glasses and liked to sing opera as he sat at his desk—where, one drizzly afternoon, he collapsed into a plate of Camembert. By unanimous proclamation, he was named Animal Hero, First Class. The next pig to die was Napoleon himself. The great Berkshire boar. The father of all animals. Savior of equality, liberty, and freedom. He had died in a manner fit to his station—passing in his sleep, between sheets of Egyptian cotton (with an extremely high thread-count).
In commemorative tribute, a twelve-foot statue of Napoleon was erected outside the barnhouse, at the former site of Old Major’s skull, for those who remembered Old Major, the pig who had started it all, and those days—those early, early days.
The statue was bronze—Napoleon wore his black coat and his leather leggings. Standing on his hind-legs, he puffed his pipe and looked to the horizon. Behind the statue, painted in white letters on the tar wall of the barn, was the single Commandment—Most animals are equalish. To the left of the Commandment, the verses of Founding Father Napoleon were painted in the same white letters. The poem, dedicated to the fallen leader, was authored by Minimus, who was known to be a pig with a poetic soul—
Napoleon taught us how to read.
Napoleon gives us grass and feed.
Napoleon shows us bread can rise,
With a swill o’ swell guidance from the swine.
The pigs are a species of splendorous knowing,
But also of helping, and also of showing—
That the animals of the Manor Farm
Are the tippest-toppest animals anywhere!
Gosh-darn!
So let’s give a honk and a quack and a squeak!
An oink and a moo and a whinny and a peep!
Let’s give a bark and a hoot and a caaw!
Don’t hold it back! You squeal and you neigh!
Napoleon, Napoleon, you’re king amongst the hay!
Napoleon, Napoleon, we know you’ll lead the way!
Napoleon, Napoleon, guide us everyday!
To further observe the accomplishments of the great Leader, the portrait of Napoleon, which surmounted the poem, was refreshed. Six pigeons, with a retouch of color, gave dimension to the white profile—under the tutelage of the pigs, the birds had acquired the skill of rendering.
In the year that followed, several more of the old-time swiners cast off their mortal coil. One would drown in the bathtub (through no fault of his own) when he found himself unable to get out. Another would fall victim to a swollen liver—downing his last mug of whiskey, he quietly moved on to the next life. Yet another would die of a patient torturer called cancer—fortunately, as he had long taken up Napoleon’s habit of enjoying a good pipe several times an hour, he was offered much consolation in his final months. All, heroes of the rebellion, were declared Animal Heroes, First Class.
The younger pigs filled their places well-enough, it seemed, though they were a reserved generation—more aloof, and perhaps, more lenient. They were led by their elder, Squealer, who for years had been Napoleon’s chief counselor. He was a pig who could wag his tail and tongue quite persuasively—so much so that in the end, he may have convinced even himself that he was a pig of the populace. Though he had been saying for years that rations were increasing, for the first time that anyone could remember (aside from the pigs, who were always firm in their conviction that things were always getting better) it seemed possible that the ration-bag was a little rounder—and noticeably so. When Squealer died, he himself had grown so fat that he was blinded by his own face. The cause of death, it was pronounced, was over-work.
Snowball's Chance