The Never End: The Other Orwell, the

Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the Origin

of Animal Farm John Reed
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-never-end-the-other-orwell-the-cold-war-the-cia-
mi6-and-the-origin-of-animal-farm-john-reed/
 The Never End
The Other Orwell, the Cold War,
the CIA, MI6, and the Origin
of Animal Farm
John Reed
 The Never End

“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’s Chance parodies Orwell’s Animal Farm, dragging it kicking and screaming
into the twenty-first century.”
—Publisher’s Weekly

“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.”
—The Fort Myers News-Press

“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

“Orwell’s sacred pigs get a proper roast.”

—The Portland Tribune

“Fearless, provocative, and both reverent and irreverent at the same time.”
—WordRiot

“Some books double as a matchstick: if struck in the right conditions, they can cause
a wildfire.”
—The Rumpus

“Reed has brought music’s remix culture to literature with stunning results.”
—largeheartedboy

“Reed skewers our early twenty-first century (edgy, tragic, absurd) with a marvelously
precise wit.”
—Locus Magazine

“Snowball’s gambit is to turn the farm into a giant spectacle of happiness, and his
Animal Fair represents more than just a place: it names an entire ethos.”
—Guernica

“One of the keenest thinkers of our time.”

—PopMatters
“A brilliant and challenging tour de force. Which could be said about every book of
his.”
—Michael Lally

“John Reed has been writing hard-to-classify books for over a decade, to great acclaim
and sometimes greater notoriety.”
—Bomb Magazine

“This book has something to upset almost everyone who reads it, just like a good
book should.”
—Dennis Loy Johnson
 John Reed

The Never End

The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA,
MI6, and the Origin of Animal Farm
John Reed
The New School University
New York, NY, USA

ISBN 978-981-99-0764-9 ISBN 978-981-99-0765-6 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any
other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation,
computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in
this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher
nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains
neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Singapore Pte Ltd.
The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore
189721, Singapore
 Acknowledgments

I’ve had a great deal of help on this project. To begin, thanks to Anna Fridlis,
who was with me for much of the two-year chasedown of “Animal Riot,” by
Nikolai Kostomarov. Profound thanks, as well, to Tanya Paperny, who trans-
lated the text of “Animal Riot,” and granted that it be included here. In
preparing this collection—checking against publications, expanding, cleaning
up, footnoting—I’m grateful to early contributions from Kyle Wu, major
contributions from Natalie Cruz, heroic contributions from Lisette Boer, and
last-hour contributions from Eliza Reed. Thanks as well to Bretty Rawson and
Jordan Rothacker for initiating the two included conversations, and also to
Daniel Levin Becker for his indefatigable work toward The Believer’s publi-
cation of my expurgated and footnoted version of “Freedom of the Press.”
Snowball’s Chance,1 which started me out on this journey, would not have
been possible without James Sherry and Deborah Thomas of Roof Books,
Alexis Hurley and Kim Witherspoon of Inkwell Management, Ryan Harbage
of The Fischer-Harbage Agency, Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House
Books, John Strausbaugh of The New York Press, Dinitia Smith of The New
York Times, and PEN America for its army of lawyers. Also, a debt of thanks
is due to Nicholas Birns for his scholarship and Jacob Dreyer for his erudition
and belief.
Thanks also to Yeardley Leonard, Eliza Reed, and Cassius Reed, for their
willingness to accompany me on this exhilarating and occasionally absurd
adventure. And thank you to my colleagues in Creative Writing at The New
School University for their friendship, wisdom, and humanity, and The New
School University for its research support.

1 Snowball’s Chance. Roof Books, 2002.

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks, as well, to the editors, publishers, and dedicated literary people

who worked with me toward the completion of these essays, which were
originally (print and online) published in:
The Paris Review
MobyLives/Melville House Publishing
Harper’s Magazine
The Rumpus
Literary Hub
The New York Press
The Brooklyn Rail
The Believer
PANK Magazine
 Contents

The Never End 1

2013: Animal Farm Timeline 15
2013: George Orwell’s “Freedom of the Press,” a Proposed
Preface to Animal Farm, Expurgated and Footnoted (with a Bias) 63
2015: Revisionist History: The Origin of Animal Farm (Was
a Little-Known Story, “Animal Riot,” by Russian/Ukrainian
Scholar Nikolai Kostomarov) 77
2003: Saint George and the Damn Truth 103
2003: The Anti-Matter of George Orwell 107
2003: A Modest Disposal: Jail All Living Artists. Elvis Stays 113
2011: The Politics of Narrative 121
2016: Pigs, Goats, Tea Parties, Walking Magnets and Scotch
Central: John Reed with Bretty Rawson 133
2016: Life in Interesting Times/What Orwell Can (and Can’t)
Teach Us: Jordan Rothacker in Conversation with John Reed
on Fascism and the Neo-Liberal Oligarchy 147
1879, 1917, 2015: “Animal Riot: Letter from a Little Russian
Landowner to His Friend in St. Petersburg” By Nikolai
Kostomarov, Translated by Tanya Paperny 153
2022: The War of Passive Aggression: Orwell’s (Yes,
“Orwellian”) Forever Cold War, and Now China 171

Index 181

vii
 About the Author

John Reed is the author of A Still Small Voice; The Whole; the SPD
bestseller, Snowball’s Chance; All The World’s A Grave: A New Play By
William Shakespeare; Tales of Woe; Free Boat: Collected Lies and Love
Poems; A Drama In Time: The New School Century; and The Family
Dolls: A Manson Paper + Play Book. He’s contributed to, among other
venues: Guernica, ElectricLit, The Brooklyn Rail, Tin House, Paper Maga-
zine, Artforum, Hyperallergic, Bomb Magazine, Art in America, The Los
Angeles Times, The Believer, The Rumpus, Observer, PEN Poetry Series, The
Daily Beast, Gawker, Slate, The Paris Review, The Times Literary Supple-
ment, The Wall Street Journal, Vice, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine,
and Rolling Stone, and he’s been anthologized in (selected) Best American
Essays. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University and is
an associate professor and the current director of the MFA in Creative Writing
at The New School University.

ix
 List of Illustrations

Sid Pig xii

The second tower 14
Nikolai Kostomarov, stamp of Ukraine, 1992 17
Horns & hooves 19
Mykhailo Hrushevsky on Ukrainian banknote 21
George & Eileen on the Aragon Front at Huesca, 1937 23
Hitler and Stalin 25
T.S. Eliot 27
Arthur, Mamaine (Celia’s twin sister), Robie and Flannery, 1947 29
Ants 31
From the painting ‘Nikolai Kostomarov in his coffin’ by Ilya Repin 34
Polemic, no. 2, with essays by Orwell and Russell 36
New York State pamphlet, You and the Atomic Bomb, 1950 38
Panel from the IRD cartoon version of Animal Farm 40
Is This Tomorrow: America Under Communism! Educational Comic Book
(Catechetical Guild) 1947 43
Still from the film of Animal Farm (Halas & Batchelor) 1955 45
Sonia Brownell in 1949 47
Sonia Orwell in New York 49
Trotskyite with big feet 54
Hitch 58
Turn of century 60
Shitty Mickey 112
Eric Blair of the Imperial Indian Police 170

xi
 The Never End

God save the Queen

The fascist regime

They made you a moron

Potential H-bomb

God save the Queen

She ain’t no human being 1

The Sex Pistols. 1977. I was a kid, but I might have heard the song around
then. They made it to the States at the end of the year, and I was a down-
town creature, from downtown creatures. My mother was singing at the Mudd
Club.2

There’s a black ribbon bash in history

perplexing you and vexing me
Come on, it’s stacked up to be the best
party in town

1“God Save the Queen.” Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s The Sex Pistols. Virgin, A&M,
1977.
2 A nightclub located at 77 White Street in Tribeca, open from 1978–1983. Lyrics from
a poem by the singer, artist Judy Rifka: originally published in a chapbook of poems and
illustrations by Rifka, Cheap Today, which was edited by Judith Doyle and published by
her press, Rumour Publications (Toronto, 1979).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023
J. Reed, The Never End,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_1
2 J. REED

Meltdown to the Black Ribbon Bash

Meltdown to the other side of town

Whenever it happened exactly, I remember the impact of The Sex Pistols.

They were crude, unmusical, doomed—but they were right. The Queen was
inhuman.
2022. I’m pulling the essays together for this publication: the Queen dies.
I have all kinds of thrilling delusions about the end of the global monarchy.
Too bad. Anyhoo, it’s about time.
As it is for George Orwell. The writing here spans twenty years; some of my
early essays strike me as screechy, high-pitched in their rage. Revise? Expel? As
I mulled over what to compile and what to exclude, I remembered the tone
of the early 00s; when I said Orwell wasn’t the benevolent white savior that
we’d made him out to be; that he’d been complicit with the CIA, etc., and
that, however intentionally, a campaign against revolution, and for that matter
political change, had originated in the farm animals, or, “the proletariat,”
as Orwell might have identified them in his youth. I had the evidence—in
overwhelming plenty. Orwell’s collaborations with the Congress for Cultural
Freedom (CCF), the British Secret Service, and what was to become MI6—
all that was already known. Animal Farm’s massive distribution as front-line,
Western propaganda in the Cold War. And Orwell’s lists.
And I had the motivation. 9/11. The skyline of my childhood. Just down
from where I lived on Lafayette Street in 2001. And an out-the-window view
from PS41, where I read Animal Farm over and over again, second through
fifth grade, and was pummeled with the message: all revolutions are destined
to fail; we’re just too greedy and dumb; we will always be our own worst
enemy.
True? An appeal to torpor? Maybe, maybe. But a tool, regardless, to quash
the radical impulse, to instruct would-be reformers—in the case of Animal
Farm, literally the youth of the world—in the philosophy of political and
cultural resignation, and conformity.
Saying that in 2002 roused hysteria. Orwell was a great man: the great
common man; the great voice of reason; the great torch bearer of truth.
Ad infinitum. And my early essays are tormented, in response, fevered and
panting,3 shouting up to people atop a wall who are shouting down, with
bullhorns.
Shortly after Snowball’s Chance 4 came out, 2002, I walked the block and a
half to Cooper Union to listen to Christopher Hitchens talk about Orwell.
His recent book, Why Orwell Matters ,5 was a whitewash of Orwell (the

3 Alex Cockburn, who wrote the introduction to the first edition of Snowball’s Chance,
also evidenced this hysteria in the Orwell discussion of the 00s.
4 Roof Books.
5 Also Orwell’s Victory. Basic Books, 2008.
 THE NEVER END 3

blacklists/enemy lists that Orwell wrote and handed over to the Informa-
tion Research Department were the literary scandal of the moment), and a
reframing of the Cold War, which was a term Orwell coined, or at the very
least popularized. Orwell’s “Cold War” was with Russia, China, and commu-
nism in general. The new Cold War, Hitchens’ Cold War, was with the Islamic
world.
The Orwell estate had threatened to sue, I guess, me and my publisher, on
the grounds that Snowball’s Chance wasn’t a parody, and the book had gotten
a splashy press reception as a result (albeit via a small publishing house—the
threats of the Orwell estates, in terms of normative distribution, had worked).
On stage, Hitchens said something scornful about me—that I was named for
the John Reed who wrote The Ten Days that Shook the World—and during
questions, I introduced myself from the audience, to a collective gasp, and
engaged him from there.6
After the event, in our interaction, Hitchens was polite, affable. We spoke
together, and one after the other to Rachel Donadio, then of a conserva-
tive local New York City newspaper, where she published a sectarian bit of
coverage7 that I was nonetheless grateful for. Hitchens, after our individual
chats with Donadio, promised me a steak and a bottle of Irish whiskey; he reit-
erated those promises when I “debated” him on the BBC . My mic kept going
off. (I would have a chance to redeem myself on another BBC program.8 )
Over the years, I’d see Hitchens around, but he had the poor etiquette to die
before he handed over my bottle of Ardbeg.
Some of Orwell’s magic rubbed off on Hitchens; to this day he is revered.
Personally, I liked him, and I liked talking to him, even if he was a drunk
rambler and his later successes as a pundit stemmed primarily from his ability
to make no sense whatsoever. In talking to me that first time on the BBC , for
example, he kept implying I was making a point about a walking stick; Orwell
had or hadn’t hit someone with a walking stick? Or something? A reference to
some ancient spat I couldn’t care less about.
Nevertheless, from that interview on, I was in. Hitchens called me a “Bin
Ladenist,” haha, and that would become my casting call: rabid leftist. I didn’t
really fit, of course,9 and my critique of Orwell’s collaboration was more
perfunctorily factual than anything else; Hitchens and his teammates were
apologists, and their attempts to recast the Cold War in terms of Islamism
were strained and frail.

6 I was probably named for my great uncle, John August Reed, a prominent architect
of California modernism—but I wouldn’t be surprised if the literary John Reed figured in.
7 [Title unknown]. The New York Sun, November 7, 2002. “Snowball’s Chance is
premised on the belief that Orwell’s Allegory was a piece of Cold War Agitprop.”
8 BBC Radio: November 27, Today Show; November 28, World News Report.
9 I’ve been told there’s a Chinese proverb: “do not name the well from which you do
not wish to drink.”
4 J. REED

Their argument, if not exactly indisputable, was also not exactly new; I’d
first heard the inklings of their points in the 70s, when I was back in PS41
in fourth grade, being asked to interpret the Iran Hostage Crisis re: Animal
Farm. The teacher would bring out Animal Farm and apply it readily to
any revolution (Iran, China, whatever)—with a fatalism that was part patri-
otism, and part capitulation: the pigs were of another cast. That any wrong,
intellectual or personal, could be ascribed to George Orwell was heresy.
Cut back to Cooper Union, 2002: mealy white men with greasy hair
scolded me from seated rows on all sides. What I was saying, in Snowball’s
Chance, was an affront to the integrity of contrarians everywhere (who, despite
their avowed independence, parroted Orwell endlessly). In picking up the
subject of Animal Farm, I had inadvertently questioned the legitimacy of
Hitchens’ own turn to the right (which was the wellspring of his newfound
popularity). Much as Orwell’s later life success had been delineated by his
collaboration with a far-right agenda, so was the case for Hitchens. And in
fact, the rightest turn of the elder white man would be paradigmatic of the
coming century: politics over facts, history, or reason. Looking back at two of
my early essays, collected here, one can map the trajectory:

Orwell’s defenders always look to contextualize Orwell’s shortcomings in a

historic moment. Whatever his infraction, he was a victim of circumstance—
times were different then, and, for example, Hitler was looking really good for
a minute there. Orwell never meant that his books should be employed to stul-
tify schoolchildren. And yet that’s what Animal Farm is—an educational missile
aimed at any healthy impulse toward reform. The argument that Animal Farm
is a generalized indictment of totalitarianism is simply unsupportable by the text
or any existing presentation of the text. Rather, the intelligence of the pigs as
opposed to the stupidity of the other animals, and the ultimate hopelessness of
revolution, renders Animal Farm a de facto endorsement of the status quo.10
Demonstrating a consistent lack of aptitude for “the power of facing,”
Hitchens just dismisses the work of anyone he disagrees with. Salmon Rushdie,
Edward Said, Martin Amis, etcetera—all wrong, foolish or deceitful. Hitchens’
rule is, if it’s minor, concede it, if it’s major, say it’s minor. In his hiccup of a
chapter discussing the most disputed issue of the Orwell legacy, Hitchens pooh-
poohs the list of 135 names that Orwell wrote up in the capacity of an informer
for the “Information Research Department” (of the British Secret Service). To
Hitchens, Orwell didn’t mean any harm, and probably didn’t do any harm, and
the thirty-five names not yet released by the British government don’t indi-
cate an obfuscation of something untoward, such as a “blacklist,” but rather,
the “inanity of British officialdom.” Of the list that has been released, Orwell’s
bluntly racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic asides are similarly submitted to
Hitchens’ power of sidestepping. … Regardless of whether or not Orwell did
make, or would have made, or would have recanted a turn to the right, Orwell,
to Hitchens, is little more than self-justification. As much as Hitchens models

10 “Saint George and the Damn Truth.” MobyLives /Melville House Publishing,
November 10, 2003.
 THE NEVER END 5

himself on Orwell, one can’t dispel a notion that Orwell probably wouldn’t
have liked Hitchens, either. Employing Orwell to bludgeon dissent, Christo-
pher Hitchens has firmly positioned himself among the legions of “smelly little
orthodoxies” that Orwell considered “a pox on the twentieth century.”11

I wonder now about the shrillness of my delivery; my reluctance was showing.

But if Orwell esoterica wasn’t my foremost interest, I eventually realized that,
in part, it was my calling. In the fashion of writer as hero, so principal to
the mythos of George Orwell and his imitators and acolytes, I would fashion
myself a reluctant hero, a lone-wolf voice, a man of ethics standing alone in a
storm of hypocrisy—but with two decades of Orwell, my youthful fervor, my
readiness to take up this cause, was overcome by dissociated resolve. It seemed
I was the one.
When the pandemic began, I would go out each night to play my trumpet
on the back porch of the old house where we were staying. With the very
old house came a very old tree, which overhung the porch, and listened to
me noodling in the blues scale. On an evening a few weeks into this, the tree
looked down at me, as it might to one of its many squirrels, and said, “Thank
you for playing the trumpet for me.” And I said, “I’m not playing for you—
I’m just practicing, on the porch.” And the tree said to me, “Thank you for
playing the trumpet for me.”
I’m not frothing at the mouth over Orwell. I have my own history
with Animal Farm from US public school (not at all like the UK public
school—Hitchens made that mistake when we interacted) but I’m not terribly
interested in the bickering of Orwell and his generation; I’m much more inter-
ested in the creative paradigm. The bickering is little more than the forced
(toxic) masculinity that Orwell practiced.12 Alas, I’m probably also guilty of
it; I often remember how Christopher Hitchens apologized to me at Cooper
Union. He had struck “below the belt” he said, in claiming I was named for
the communist author of The Ten Days that Shook the World. It’s easy for me,
in all this, to feel self-critical and humiliated; I was right, and history has borne

11 “The Anti-Matter of George Orwell.” The Brooklyn Rail , April–May 2003. A version
of this piece is included in this collection.
12 Elisaveta Fen (Lydia Jackson/née Lidiia Vitalevna Zhiburtovich), in her memoir, A
Russian’s England (Paul Gordon Books, 1976), cited Orwell’s gender performance in
relation to a plaintive semi love letter he penned to her on March 1, 1939. “I wonder
who your young man is now?” wrote Orwell, “I have thought of you so often—have
you thought about me, I wonder? I know it’s indiscreet to write such things in letters,
but you’ll be clever & burn this, won’t you?” Fen, a once roommate of Orwell’s first
wife, Eileen, always denied that her rumored affair with Orwell was anything more than
a kiss, and recalled that her reaction to the letter was little less than repulsed: “I was
looking forward to seeing Eileen again, but not George, especially as the tone of his letter
suggested a renewal of the amorous behavior I had been too softhearted to repel. … I
had several men friends at the time whom I found more attractive than George, and his
masculine conceit annoyed me.”
6 J. REED

that out, but why did I have to be so peevish about it?13 I suppose it was a
manifestation of my own insecurities in the face of a seemingly all-powerful
enemy. And it was the moment itself—the temperature, the direction of the
wind, the screaming conversation passing in years. Copyright, propaganda,
the never-ending war, not until I worked on All the World’s a Grave 14 was
I less petulant about it all. The idea was to write an answer to Henry V , the
greatest recruitment play of all time, by piecing together, with Shakespeare’s
own language, an anti-war tragedy.15 The surviving press copy reads:

What it is: the known works of W.S., reconstructed, line by line, into a new
tragedy, starring Hamlet, Juliet & Romeo, Iago, Macbeth, The Queen, Three
Weird Sisters, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, and the Ghost of the King.
The story: Hamlet goes to war for Juliet, the daughter of King Lear. Having
captured his bride—by unnecessary bloodshed—Prince Hamlet returns home
to find that his mother has murdered his father and married Macbeth. Hamlet,
wounded and reeling, is sought out by the ghost of his murdered further, and
commanded to seek revenge. Iago, opportunistic, further inflames the enraged
Prince, persuading him that Juliet is having an affair with Romeo; the Prince
goes mad with jealousy.
The issues engendered: war; parody; sex and exploitation; the current Shake-
speare fracas (was Shakespeare really Shakespeare, and what is authorship?);
the long history of Shakespeare adaptations; Shakespeare and Hollywood; the
public domain; the literary canon; the state of contemporary letters in relation
to “great” works; and the creative future we bequeath our children.

Somewhat more confident with the subject matter, I wrote, in an “Outro,”

about my aspirations and the innerscape of my beliefs:

My first love was literature: even the love of loving literature was achingly seduc-
tive. Fahrenheit 451: the end-time of a world without books. Portrait of the
Artist (and derivatives): the heroism of the written act itself. In college, I spent
three days in bed, reading Moby Dick, and, by the end, had a respectable whale
imitation going. But for all that love, and the life I’ve given to books, if I could
make one enduring contribution, it would be to assist in the end of literature
as we know it. The shelf space is hoarded by mediocre classics, and we have
hobbled our culture, and our creative culture, with received wisdoms.
Where are today’s Dostoevskys? Where are today’s Virginia Wolfs? To ask is to
confess an absence of engagement with contemporary letters. Those books are
out there, many of them, languishing. …

13 For example, my 2003 satirical pieces, A Modest Disposal and Shitty Mickey, are
included in this collection.
14 Penguin Books/Plume, 2008.
15
Our first blurb, from Spalding Gray, read: “It’s a shrewd, gutsy remix that brings the
conscience of Shakespeare to our troubled times.”
 THE NEVER END 7

I’ve been having funny dreams lately. Not too long ago, I dreamt I was in
attendance at some kind of sporting event: maybe polo. It was late afternoon,
the first cooling off of a hot day. I was part of a standing audience of intellec-
tuals and petty nobility. (I can’t quite put a period to the setting.) One of our
party came running out—having just been received by a royal audience—and
he reported gleefully, in staccato barks, that the Queen had given him a poop.
One of her poops. He held a clear plastic carry case (which, by the way, was
identical to the case we use to contain my daughter’s pet lizards when we’re
cleaning the aquarium). It had two lean, firm dark turds in it; one lay partly
atop the other, not-quite perpendicular. Everyone mocked the bearer of the
turds—mercilessly. He took his teasing in good humor, as it was meant. Then
the crowd went silent, breath held, as he slowly lifted the case up to his nose,
to sniff the Queen’s poop. His expression was one of enormous concentration.
He sniffed like a connoisseur of wine—committing the sensory experience to
memory.
Then, the crowd still silent, he passed the plastic tub to the person beside him:
with a similar sense of purpose, this person, too, sniffed the poop. And then—
the silence settling in like reverence—the tub was passed from one set of hands
to the next. The tub was passed gently, like an urn of ashes. And everyone lifted
it to their nose, and sniffed it.16

Publishing, reading, revisiting Orwell over the next ten years, the tenor of
the discussion didn’t change markedly; when I returned more determinedly
for the ten-year anniversary edition of the Snowball (Melville House, 2012),
I had various ideas about new essays: among them, the Animal Farm/CIA
timeline and the origins of Animal Farm essays I would later publish.17 But
there were other essays I began work on, essays which I would pick up and
put down all the way through the preparation of this collection.
There was an initial fortress of Orwell apologia that made attacks quite diffi-
cult. Timothy Garton Ash and Christopher Hitchens in The New York Review
of Books ; Geoffrey Wheatcroft in The New York Times ; and Louis Menand
in The New Yorker. The story told was uniform: a sentimental portrait of a
moral man of some failings—a bit of a betraying racist, homophobic sexist—
who was quite simply struggling to tell the truth, and most importantly, was
engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Stalinists with the future of the planet
and maybe the universe at stake. The tendered defenses, never advancing
literary theses beyond what you would expect from a tenth-grade English
assignment, only ranged in spirit: Geoffrey Wheatcroft was the boot-licking
lackey, and Christopher Hitchens was the dissembling, purely partisan anti-
historian. (Hitchens was prescient in this position; take the election deniers of
today as counterpoint.)

16 All the World’s a Grave. Penguin Books/Plume, 2008.

17 Versions of these later publications are included in this collection.
8 J. REED

It was a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Information named Peter Smolka who

had quietly helped orchestrate the near suppression of Animal Farm. One might
therefore put it like this: in the late 1940s Orwell was fighting for survival as a
writer, and also considered the survival of democratic and socialist values to be
at stake in the struggle against Stalin. …
On March 29, 1949, Orwell received a visit at his hospital bedside from Celia
Kirwan, who was among other things an official of the IRD. She was also the
sister-in-law of Arthur Koestler, and Orwell had already, in that capacity, met
her and proposed marriage to her. They discussed the necessity of recruiting
socialist and radical individuals to the fight against the Communists. This subject
was already close to Orwell’s heart, as can be seen from the story of his effort
to get Animal Farm circulated clandestinely in Eastern Europe. Ms. Kirwan
was close to his heart also, and some defenders of Orwell have kindly suggested
that this, together with his much-etiolated physical condition, may have led to
a moment of weakness.18
It should also be noted that Orwell did not hand the thirty-five names to
some faceless bureaucrat. He had known Celia Kirwan since 1945, when they
met at Koestler’s house in Wales. Indeed, he had been briefly in love with
her (she and her sister Mamaine were celebrated society beauties) and he had
even proposed marriage. Although she turned him down, they remained close
friends.19
Orwell devoted more attention to propaganda than any British writer of his
generation. … In Homage to Catalonia (1938), Orwell expresses disgust over
the fact that propaganda during the Spanish Civil War is being produced by
noncombatants sheltered from actual bullets, but within five years Orwell (who
did fight against fascism in Spain) [italics by author] was writing propaganda
for BBC radio and confiding in his diary, “All propaganda is lies, even when
one is telling the truth. I don’t think this matters so long as one knows what
one is doing, and why.” Nietzsche never put it better. Nor did Orwell restrict
himself to anti-Nazi propaganda. In August 2003 the Public Record Office
in England released a list of the “crypto communists” that Orwell compiled
in 1949 for the Information Research Department, a propaganda bureau that
operated out of the Foreign Office. The important point for my purposes is
not that a leftist would collaborate with the government to root out suspected
communists. Although the notion of Orwell as a McCarthyite is alarming, there
is no evidence that his handling over the list did anyone any harm.20
Writers are not entirely responsible for their admirers. It is unlikely that Jane
Austen, if she were here today, would wish to become a member of the Jane
Austen Society. In his lifetime, George Orwell was regarded, even by his friends,
as a contrary man. It was said that the closer you got to him the colder and
more critical he became. As a writer, he was often hardest on his allies. He was
a middle-class intellectual who despised the middle class and was contemptuous

18 Christopher Hitchens. “Orwell’s Lists.” The New York Review of Books , 2002.
19
Hugh Wilford. The CIA, the British Left and the Cold War. Frank Cass Publishers,
2003.
20 Mark Wollaeger. Modernism, Media, and Propaganda: British Narrative from 1900 to
1945. Princeton University Press, 2006.
 THE NEVER END 9

of intellectuals, a Socialist whose abuse of Socialists—“all that dreary tribe of

high-minded women and sandal-wearers and bearded fruit juice drinkers who
come flocking toward the smell of ‘progress’ like bluebottles to a dead cat”—
was as vicious as any Tory’s. He preached solidarity, but he had the habits of a
dropout, and the works for which he is most celebrated, Animal Farm, 1984,
and the essay “Politics and the English Language,” were attacks on people who
purported to share his political views. He was not looking to make friends. But
after his death he suddenly acquired an army of fans—all middle-class intellec-
tuals eager to suggest that a writer who approved of little would have approved
of them. …
His first wife, Eileen, with whom he adopted a son, died in 1945. He
proposed to several women thereafter, sometimes suggesting, as an inducement,
that he would probably die soon and leave his widow with a valuable estate; but
he struck out. Then, in 1949, when he really was on his deathbed, he married
Sonia Brownell, a woman whose sex appeal was widely appreciated. Brownell
had slept with Orwell once, in 1945, apparently from the mixed motives of
pity and the desire to sleep with famous writers, one of her hobbies. The
marriage was performed in a hospital room; Orwell died three months later.
He ended up selling more books than any other serious writer of the twentieth
century—Animal Farm and 1984 were together translated into more than sixty
languages; in 1973, English-language editions of 1984 were still selling at a rate
of 1,340 copies a day—and he left all his royalties to Sonia. She squandered
them and died more or less in poverty, in 1980. Today, Orwell’s gravesite, in a
churchyard in Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, is tended by volunteers.21

Bernard Crick, the Orwell biographer par-excellence of the later century, poses
his incredibly insightful question, “Why are radicals so eager to give up one
of their own?”22 but still, in answer, can’t help but back away from Orwell’s
culpability. Orwell’s collaborations were “no different from responsible citi-
zens nowadays passing on information to the anti-terrorist squad about people
in their midst whom they believe to be IRA bombers.” Of course, Frances
Stoner Saunders, in The Cultural Cold War (The New Press, 1999), demurs:
“There is no evidence that anyone on Orwell’s list (as far as has been made
public) was involved in any illegal undertaking, and certainly nothing which
would justify the comparison to … terrorists. ‘Homosexual’ was the only
indictment which bore any risk of criminal conviction, though this does not
seem to have deterred Orwell in his bestowal of the word.”
As formidable as the fortifications erected around Orwell by The New York
Times , The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books , a long siege of
such poor argumentation was inevitable. Wollaeger’s assertion in Modernism,
Media, and Propaganda that there was “no evidence that his [Orwell’s]
handling over the list did anyone any harm” is typical of the bizarre entitle-
ment of the great man edifice. The parallel would be something like this: you

21 Louis Menand. “Honest, Decent, Wrong.” The New Yorker, 2003.

22 “Why Are Radicals so Eager to Give Up One of Their Own?” The Independent , July
14, 1996.
10 J. REED

were party to a stoning, or a firing squad, but claim innocence in that your
stone might not have struck its target, or that you took aim, but you might
have missed. Menand, for his contribution in “Honest, Decent, Wrong” goes
so far as to apologize not only for Orwell but for Orwell’s fanboys: “Writers
are not entirely responsible for their admirers.” Menand then proceeds with
that sickening characterization of Sonia Bronwell: the gold digger to Orwell as
Christ. Nothing but ugly presumption supposes that Bronwell had nefarious
designs on Orwell; as of their marriage in 1949, there was still little to indi-
cate Orwell would amount to much—Orwell had enjoyed recent recognition,
but any talk of legacy would have been preposterously speculative. She was a
writer and she liked him, even though he was contemptible; more confusing
things have happened in this life.
Through the decade to come, the twenty-tens, the Orwell defense grew
more distant, a faint cry. But if the gasconaders shriveled in stature and assur-
ance,23 the lists were set entirely aside. Despite the hefty historical case that
had mounted against Orwell, there was as much of a hesitancy to condemn
him as there was to commend him.24
In 1949, Orwell wrote, “At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.” Orwell,
who didn’t live to 50, would return to this idea in different forms; in origin,
one could point to a 1942 criticism of Orwell written by Derek “Stanley”
Savage, a poet and anarchist and prominent critic.

What is the actual social system which he is fighting to defend? What hopes
has he of diverting the stream of history the way he wants it to go? Brave
words and muddled thinking cannot disguise the fact that Mr. Orwell, like all
the other supporters of the war, shipping magnates, coal owners, proletarians,
university professors, Sunday journalists, Trade Union leaders, Church digni-
taries, scoundrels and honest men, is being swept along by history, not directing
it. Like them, he will be deposited, along with other detritus, where history
decides, not where he thinks.25

In 2013, I began gathering pieces to the puzzle of “Animal Riot” by Nikolai

Kostomarov, the story which served as the basis for Animal Farm. As of
this writing, making the assertion is effortless, but it would take me two
years to scrounge through literary history to find that certainty. With my
previous Orwell writings, I’d experienced so much pushback, vitriolic, spiteful,
wounded, that I was prepared for what might come—but the response was
not what I expected. The literary community just shrugged: so, they seemed

23 Jason Cowley. “After Orwell.” Financial Times , 2013.

24 Catherine Buni. “From Orwell to Trump: When Does Egoism Become Narcissism?”
Literary Hub, 2016.
25This 1942 retort was published in Partisan Review in response to positions taken by
Orwell in The “London Letters” series—fifteen articles when the UK waited for invasion
by Nazi Germany—also published in Partisan Review.
 THE NEVER END 11

to say, this is the basis for Animal Farm. They accepted the footnote, and the
accompanying criticism of Orwell. It was news, but not heartbreak.
The two other essays that I began work on in 2013, which I revisited for
this collection only to cast off yet again: “A Few Names to be remembered
with George Orwell,”26 and “Orwell’s Angels (Army).” The former of these
working titles refers to an attempt to present a clear view of Orwell’s “lists,”
and who he did/didn’t turn over to the British Secret Service. The intention
was to organize the information in as concise a manner as possible. It would be
a list of lists to end all lists: 1000–2000 words, which I drafted. The problem:
despite what I thought was a very sound hypothesis and explanation of the
record, I still felt the essay was no more than that—conjecture, however plau-
sible, however likely. I couldn’t write the final word, because ultimately too
much of the history was lost, beclouded, or concealed.
The second of the aforementioned unwritten essays would endeavor to
chronicle the inclination to blame women for Orwell’s wrongs. As indicated
by the quotes from the apologists cited a few pages back, there was a seeming
unanimity in faulting and shaming Orwell’s female associations: it was never
Orwell himself that committed the infraction, his actions were merely conse-
quential of the poor influences of his wives, love interests, and women friends.
The essay never found its way into a draft because I couldn’t come up with
a form that was appropriate.27 Trading cards? A family tree? How could I
mount this criticism without falling prey to it? The last thing I wanted was
to perpetuate the mischaracterizations. Maybe I was especially vulnerable to
them? Or maybe the mischaracterizations were inextricable from the history
as it had been written? The literary record wasn’t just hazy, it was befouled.
With the twenty-year anniversary of Snowball, and with my work here, I am
confronted in the daily news cycle with the ongoing same-old argument that
Orwell should be more applicable than ever: 1984 hit the bestseller list with
the election of the US president in 2016; President Trump et al. are an attes-
tation to the dissolve of language and objective truth28 ; China’s domineering
political class of state-sponsored pigs, and the total surveillance of its citizens,
summons the Big Brother of the Western lesson plan.29 But the corollaries are
curiously hollow—perhaps because the West is no longer the West, and we can
26 The unfinished draft of this essay is included in these pages as a footnote in “George
Orwell’s ‘Freedom of the Press,’ a Proposed Preface to Animal Farm, expurgated and
footnoted (with a bias).”
27 Lisette Boer, who’s been invaluable in preparing these pages, sifted through all the
relevant sources—Sonia Brownell to 1984’s Julia—and neatly archived the research for this
essay that never took place.
28 Stephen Rohde. “Big Brother Is Watching You: Is America Becoming Orwell’s Night-
mare?” Los Angeles Review of Books , 2017; Summer Brennan. “Notes from the Resistance:
A Column on Language and Power.” Literary Hub, 2016.
29 Jeffrey Wasserstrom. “Hot Dystopic: Orwell and Huxley at the Shanghai’s World
Fair.” Los Angeles Review of Books , 2011; Simon Tisdall. “China v Russia v America: Is
2021 the Year Orwell’s 1984 Comes True?” The Observer, 2021; Ian Williams. “China’s
Digital Stasi Sees All from Cyberspace.” The Times , 2022.
12 J. REED

no longer adhere, naive and foolhardy, to the promise of a paradise brought

on by capitalism and scientific enlightenment. That particular tomorrow will
never dawn.

For decades, America gave China a vision of future prosperity. But today,
America has mostly ceased to offer a model for China or anywhere else. …
The America that inspired China to change in its own image has become a
baneful indication of what not to do, a monument to aristocratic liberalism’s
propensity to overtake democracy.30

With our cultural confusions and self-deceptions and financial entanglements

with every pure evil, the West has dissolved its borders and arguably itself.
The claim that Orwell’s Cold War may be brought to an equation balancing
the West and China, that 1984’s Big Brother is Xi Jinping, is on arrival so very
flawed an analog as to merit an endless debunking. On the flip side, the Orwell
canon has been so overanalyzed and cited that one could meander through
an endless proof that demonstrated the equation oh-so correct. Orwell, a
spy? Orwell, a truth-seeking Jedi? The whole of the Orwell debate is likewise
endless, as is the whole of the Orwell commission, history, literary studies,
biography; there will always be that many more subjects to research, and essays
to write, and texts to translate.31 The tasks are infinite, and decrease in impact
and importance into infinite pointlessness.
In 1950, Irving Howe decreed what was then agreed to be the final
word on 1984; today, Howe’s praise is arrogant, insufferable, and painfully
obvious.32 Almost all of Orwell’s journalism and personal writing is whining
and stinking of body odor. He was a man who was very hard to like: self-
aggrandizing33 and self-pitying.34 As a critic, he was mediocre; as a political
columnist, engrossed in day-to-day squabbles; as a novelist, sentimental, and
imperialist. The best thing about George Orwell was Animal Farm, and yet
even Animal Farm was scuffed with the black mark of his policeman’s boot.
Why are we still fond of Orwell? We keep asking. Maybe it’s that he was such a
genuinely sincere propagandist. Maybe, where we once loved him despite the
compact he made with the devil, we are now denizens of so broken an epoch
that we love him because of it. And/or, maybe we are touched by the ability
he had, every so often, to see himself. As he wrote in the closing passages to
Homage to Catalonia 35 :

30 Jacob Dreyer. “The Rise and Fall of Chimera.” Noema, 2022; Jacob Dreyer is also
the editor of this collection.
31 The novella Bunt by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont, for example, is another precursor
to Animal Farm that has yet to see translation into English.
32 “1984—Utopia Reversed.” The New International. vol. XVI no. 6, November 1950.
33 “Why I Write.” Gangrel , Summer 1946.
34 “Such, Such Were the Joys.” Partisan Review, 1952.
35 Secker and Warburg, 1938.
 THE NEVER END 13

It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your
own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan. In
case I have not said this somewhere earlier in the book I will say it now: beware
of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by
my having seen only one corner of events.

Whatever the process, by whatever hand or disclosure, Orwell has come to

the end. But it is a new kind of ending, an ending emblematic of our time:
an irrational number that tallies off into eternity, reducing itself, obscuring
a complete understanding, forever. The end of Orwell is not sudden, but a
continuum of near repetition, a getting smaller and smaller. There will never
be a full stop, just the diminishing, in perpetuity.
 2013: Animal Farm Timeline
April 12, 2013

Timeline to This Timeline1

September 9, 2011, I’m walking down Lafayette Street with my wife. We’re
close to my apartment, with the Tribeca sky, the sky of my youth, hovering
above our destination. I have a title idea. “Snowball’s Chance,” I say, “there’s
something to it.” She isn’t so sure.
Then, 9/11. Then, 9/13, I understand the title. Animal Farm. Snowball
returns to the farm, bringing capitalism, which has its own pitfalls. I’ll turn the
Cold War allegory on its head—apply Orwell’s thinking to what had happened
in the fifty years since the end of World War II. Three weeks later I have a clean
draft.
I start to think about publication and run into a bump: the feeling in the
publishing world, in the entertainment world, is that parody is about to lose
its protected status in the United States. Several major lawsuits are underway

A version of this essay was originally published by The Paris Review.

1 I pitched this piece to The Paris Review when there was an ongoing discussion
about the legitimacy of arts and culture venues that had been outed as taking money
and/or orders from the Congress for Cultural Freedom and/or the CIA. With
the Orwell discussion still at a pitch, I wondered if The Paris Review, long known
to have had CCF/CIA ties, would be willing to acknowledge its own history publicly.
This timeline seemed like it could be an easy way to do that; more of an aside
than a confession. In the first 1950 entry of this timeline, a passage referring to The
Paris Review in this context went untouched through editorial.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 15

Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023
J. Reed, The Never End,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_2
16 J. REED

(2 Live Crew, The Wind Done Gone 2 ), copyright has been extended indefi-
nitely for major corporations, and the Supreme Court has never looked more
conservative. Given the climate, and that parody is not protected in the UK,
the Orwell estate announces itself “hostile” to my manuscript. The book is
nevertheless released in 2002 (by a small but longstanding press, Roof Books),
and supported in part by a State grant. At the same moment, I see fit to attack
Animal Farm as a Cold War allegory—an allegory that I see as conservative,
xenophobic, and a bludgeon for radical thinking—Christopher Hitchens, who
has taken a sharp turn to the right, sees the need to defend it. In Why Orwell
Matters , also published in 2002 (Basic Books), Hitchens attempted to apply
Orwell’s later life “Cold War,”3 to a stance against terrorism. The media picks
up on Hitchens, and Snowball’s Chance as a counterpoint, and the books are
accordingly praised or derided.

2 Alice Randall. HarperCollins, 2002.

3 Discussed in the second “1945” entry of this timeline.
2013: ANIMAL FARM TIMELINE 17
18 J. REED

1879/1880
Nikolai Kostomarov (1817–1885) pens his story, “Animal Riot,” a farm-
yard allegory that takes as its analog a hypothetical Russian revolution.4 A
century later, 1988, the English-language Economist will compare Kostom-
arov’s 8,500-word story to George Orwell’s20,000-word Russian-Revolution
allegory, Animal Farm (which, unlike “Animal Riot,” ends badly), finding
numerous points of comparison. For example, a bull in “Animal Riot”:

Brother bulls, sisters and cow wives. Esteemed beasts worthy of a better destiny
than the one which inexplicably befell you and made you a slave of tyrant Man!
The hour has come to cast off vile slavery and take revenge for all our ancestors
tormented by work, starved and fed repulsive feed, who collapsed dead under
whips and heavy carts, who were killed at slaughterhouses and torn to pieces by
our tormentors. Rally with hooves and horns.

Old Major in Animal Farm:

Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let’s face it: our lives are
miserable, laborious and short. We are born, we are given just so much food as
will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are
forced to work to the last atom of our strength. … Why do we then continue in
this miserable condition? Because nearly the whole of the produce of our labor
is stolen from us by human beings. There, comrades, is the answer to all our
problems. It is summed up in a single word—Man.

4 Drafted by the author circa 1879, first known publication in 1917 (Niva), translated
(by Tanya Paperny) and published in English in 2015 (selected text, Harper’s Magazine),
published in English in full in 2016 (Paperny translation, PANK Magazine, January 9).
The full Paperny translation is included in this collection.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Horizons and
landmarks
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.

Title: Horizons and landmarks

Poems

Author: Sidney Royse Lysaght

Release date: September 10, 2023 [eBook #71605]

Language: English

Original publication: London: The MacMillan and Co., Limited,

1911

Credits: Charlene Taylor, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HORIZONS

AND LANDMARKS ***
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR

POEMS OF THE UNKNOWN WAY

HORIZONS AND LANDMARKS

MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited

LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd.

TORONTO

HORIZONS
AND LANDMARKS
POEMS

BY
SIDNEY ROYSE LYSAGHT

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN’S STREET, LONDON
1911
 CONTENTS
PAGE
Three Ages of Man 1
First Horizons 3
The Fountain-Springs 14
Our Homeland 18
Shelter and Fellowship 20
The Forest 23
First Love 31
The World’s End 33
Youth 37
New Horizons 40
The Quest of Youth 42
The Road into the World 46
The Country over the Hill 53
Youth and Love 58
The Spirit and the Flesh (I.-IV.) 62
In the World 71
Hearth Light 81
The Test of Faith 83
Children’s Faith 91
A Ruined Chapel 93
North and South 98
Interpenetrations 101
Life and Love 104
Brick Horizons 105
First Pathways 109
Hidden Paths 112
The Paths of the Infinite 114
A Deserted Home 117
Beyond the Farthest Horizon 119
A Halt on the Way 126
Old Landmarks 128
 THREE AGES OF MAN

The child is part of all that he beholds;

Youth with his dreams of love the world enfolds;
Man takes life in his hands, and mars or moulds.

Freed of its load, washed of its gathered stain,

In the child’s spirit life is born again.
Of all he sees and loves he is a part:
Faith lights his footsteps; filtered through his heart
The everlasting fountain-springs o’er-run
In rills of joy, and life and he are one.

Youth is life’s lover, eager to embrace

And reach the soul that lights so fair a face;
But, as the lover on the maid confers
From his own dreams a beauty more than hers,
So youth illumines with the radiant hues
Of heart’s desire the vision he pursues.

Man is life’s guardian;—unknown issues wait

On his intent: his sight directs blind fate.
’Tis his before the Belly-god to kneel,
Or sow the harvests of life’s commonweal,—
To quit his post, or guard through pain and death
The hope with which creation travaileth.

The child gives love, and makes the world his own;
Youth looks for harvests which he has not sown;
Man shares God’s burden on the road unknown.
 FIRST HORIZONS

An open window filled with blue,

The scent of meadows wet with dew,
The talk of rooks beyond the park,
A cart wheel’s creak, a sheep-dog’s bark,
Greeted our waking: then we sped
Along the rushy path that led
Down to the peat-brown river pool,
And, glowing, dived through ripples cool,
While startled coots in skimming flight
Slipped among sedges out of sight,
Or from his lonely watch the crane
Rose on slow wings; then out again
And home to breakfast. Oh, the smell
Of furze bloom and bog-asphodel
Along the track! but still more sweet
The fragrance of the cakes of wheat,
The tea, the toast, the home-baked bread,
The roasted apples, all outspread
On damask white. Anon, our chairs
Pushed back, we knelt for morning prayers,
And, planning new adventures, heard
The voice devout but not the word.
No lingering then;—a hundred things,
New schemes, imagined happenings,
Called us away to wood and field—
For any hour of life might yield
Some wonder, some unthought of bliss,
Some miracle we dared not miss.
And gladness, hidden in the springs
Of purpose at the heart of things,
Showed us a world where work was play,
And common labours of the day
Sweet service; but we knew not then
Th b d h l id
The burdens men have laid on men,—
Nay, only those perennial tasks
Which earth of all her children asks
For fruitfulness; and glad were we
Of that good fellowship to be;
Nor sought more honour than to share
The sower’s toil, the shepherd’s care.
But most we loved the merry ring
Of whetted scythes, the rhythmic swing
Of mowers, and with fork and rake
All day to follow in their wake;
And homeward in the eventide
On the piled waggon load to ride,
While, half asleep amid the hay,
Dim fields we saw and uplands grey,
And heard beneath our swaying load
The rumbling wheel along the road.

No need had we the world to roam

To find new shores, for round our home
Our undiscovered lands arose
In autumn mists, in winter snows.
On summer nights in whispering trees
We heard the wash of Indian seas,
And ripening waves of harvest rolled
Over our hills the realms of gold;
And flood-time mapped familiar lands
With island shores and foreign strands;
And tidings of unventured ways
We gathered in the darkening days
When leafless woods began to moan
And twilight opened gates unknown.
A narrower, homelier world we knew
In winter time, and kinder grew
The sheltering bounds of landmarks old;
And, gathered within farm and fold,
The sound of voices and the stir
Of labour seemed the merrier
Because so lonely and so wide
And homeless was the world outside.
Then we discovered golden shores,
Our El Dorado’s treasure stores,
Amid the piled up sheaves of grain
Within the barn; and while the rain
Beat on the roofs we burrowed deep
In rustling caves, or from the heap
Threw down our golden citadel,
While girls unbound the sheaves that fell
For threshing, and as each new load
Between the spinning rollers flowed,
The hum of wheels, the engine’s drone
A sudden octave fell in tone;
And grain was stored, and billows soft
Of straw went rolling to the loft,
And out on skies of cheerless grey
The winnowed chaff was blown away.

But after days of winter rains

Came mornings when our window-panes
Were bright with sunshine and embossed
With silver trellises of frost;
And out we rushed across the yard,
Down rutty cart tracks, frozen hard,
And round the farm sheds and the fold
To match our blood against the cold;
And every one we met was gay,
And had the pleasant word to say.
What, then, were dreams of summer worth,
While magic regions of the north
Lay round us, and o’er fields of snow,
Along the river’s overflow,
Were Arctic seas, with many a shore
And frozen inlet to explore?—
Or while we tracked through forests bare
Wild creatures to their hidden lair?
Or when the snow had drifted deep
Or, when the snow had drifted deep,
We helped to find the scattered sheep,
Or, with the shepherds and their dogs,
Sat round a fire of brush and logs
At nightfall, when old tales were told
Of other days, and clear and cold
The starlight shone above the fold?

Not then, but when the wild South-west

Filled the dim land with its unrest
At twilight, and the woods began
To talk of things unknown to man,
And on the garden paths we heard
Strange footsteps, but no answering word
Came to our call;—
’twas then the spell
Of mystery about us fell,
The awe that held us half-afraid
To pass beyond our gates, but made
The shelter of our homely bounds
So welcome, and familiar sounds
So sweet; ’twas then before us rose
The vision of ancestral foes,
And in our ears old battle calls
At night around beleaguered walls
Rang; and, though all was safe and still,
Old dangers set our hearts a-thrill,
And in the silent courtyard made
Each door and arch an ambuscade;
And passing through our sleeping camp
We heard the stabled horses champ,
And started as a halter whirred
Along the chain rings when they stirred.

Then, with our day’s adventures o’er,

Safe housed, we heard the muffled roar
Of winds without, and round the fire
Sought for the land of heart’s desire,
Or sailed across the Spanish main
Or sailed across the Spanish main
In well-loved books; or lived again
In knightly days of long ago,
And heard the horn of Ivanhoe
At Ashby lists; or, on his steed
At Acre, saw King Richard lead
His pilgrim soldiers, worn and thin,
That broke the ranks of Saladin:—
Till, in the thickest of some fight,
Or when the captive maiden’s plight
Was sorest, suddenly the spell
Was broken, and a welcome bell
Our own forgotten days restored
And called us to the supper board;
Where, with our elders gathered round,
Good cheer and fellowship we found,
And oft a neighbour or a guest
To tell the news or speed the jest.

And all too quickly afterwards

Our bedtime came, and at their cards
And talk we left them. In the hall
The firelight flickered on the wall,
Deep shadows thronged the winding stair,
And overhead, we knew not where,
A footstep fell upon the floor
Of some deserted corridor.

But, once within our cheerful room,

No hidden phantom of the gloom
Came near us; and in bed we lay
And heard the wind that far away
Now seemed to blow,—as storms outside
Might seem to those whose vessels ride
Rocked on the gentle rise and fall
Of tides within the haven wall.
 THE FOUNTAIN-SPRINGS

Were they not memories of things known before,—

Not the strange vision of an unknown shore,
That met us when in childhood we began
To look upon our dwelling-place, and ran
Fearless to meet our fortune; when our eyes
Saw life with wonder, but without surprise;
When, though newcomers, no strange note we heard
In voice of wind or wave or song of bird;
And looking on the hills and trees and flowers
We loved, and without question made them ours;
And trusted the dumb creature and the hand
That guided us, nor sought to understand?
Were they not greetings of things old and dear,—
Not the strange voices of an alien sphere,—
That greeted us and linked us, with a bond
Of speech familiar, to some home beyond?

We were a part of all that we beheld

In those young days: it was our joy that welled
Into the sunshine with the mountain rill,
Our heart that in the rose’s heart lay still,
Our wings that held the sea-bird o’er the foam,
Our feet that brought the wandering outcast home.
Earth had no secret that we could not share,
For everything we saw and loved we were.

Not when defenceless on the earth we stood

In childhood doubted we that life was good.
Not when love made us part of everything
Could we distrust the hidden fountain-spring.
But when the years began to separate
From Life our lives, when all that once seemed great
In heaven and earth, all wonder and delight
Were narrowed to the measure of our sight;
Were narrowed to the measure of our sight;
When knowledge of the suffering and wrong
That nature dealt the weak to serve the strong,
When records of man’s greed and lust and pride
Defaced life’s beauty, and its hope belied,—
How had we then that mockery withstood,
Or trusted that the source of life was good,
Had not the memory of its old caress
Reproached our hearts in their unfaithfulness;
Had we not once beheld a face so sweet
It could not but express a heart that beat
For us, and knew what waited us, the while
It armed us for the darkness with its smile;
Had we not known those vanished hours that wove
Of homely human bonds immortal love;
Of flowers, and stars, and woods, and mountain streams,
And things that die, imperishable dreams?
 OUR HOMELAND[1]

Ours was a land of green and gold;

More gold than green, when every fold
Of down and upland was a blaze
Of furze in bloom on April days.
But when the summer-time was o’er,
And fields of corn against the moor
Waved gold on purple, and a haze
Of sunlight filled the woodland ways,
And far-off mountain boundaries
Made azure lines on azure skies,

[1] Here, and in the other poems of this volume, with few exceptions, the country
described is the south-west of Ireland.

And earth and heaven together drew,

Ours was a land of gold and blue.
Yet sometimes, just at evenfall,
When every old grey limestone wall
And crumbling tower and rocky height
Caught the last gleam of level light,
And in the west a crimson glow
Flushed the high cloud-field’s broken floe,
And deepening shades encompassed us,
And domes of coral cumulus
Above the mountains far away
In opal waters mirrored lay,
Ours was a land of rose and grey.
 SHELTER AND FELLOWSHIP

In the midst of life unknown,

Spaces boundless, pathways lone,
Earth of things that pass and fade
Homely shelter round us made,—
Dropped a veil of changing light
O’er the changeless infinite,
Over the unfathomed drew
Morning’s gold and noonday’s blue,
Lifted in the evening skies
Rose-illumined boundaries,
Wove the light of moon and stars
Into silver prison-bars.

We forget what deeps we winged

Ere we found our place on earth,
Ere the blue horizons ringed
Sheltered homelands of our birth.
Whispers of the unknown spoke
Through our dreams; but all we know
Waited for us when we woke
On the green earth long ago.
Love we found, and welcome kind,
Fellowship with everything
We were playmates of the wind,
Comrades of the bird on wing.
Creatures dumb we understood,
Knew them kin,—the shy or bold,—
Hid with these in cave and wood,
Watched with those o’er hearth and fold.
Happy on our way we went,
Meadow secrets, forest clues,
Learning from the firwoods’ scent,
Winning from the wild flowers’ hues.
Trusting life itself, we grew
One with all we loved and knew;
Every thought we sent a-wing
Linked us with some living thing;
Every kindness that we did
Treasure for us somewhere hid.
So, outside ourselves was sown
All that grew to be our own;
So we put our wealth in trust
Past the reach of moth and rust.
Wherefore, no defeat or lure
Now can leave us wholly poor;
Never can we fail to find
Somewhere a sweet face and kind,—
Somewhere shelter and a friend
Waiting at the journey’s end.
 THE FOREST

Far away to hills of blue,

Sunlit pastures, uplands wide,
Ways familiar, homes we knew,
Round us lay on every side
Save on one; on one alone,
Where the ancient forest spread,
Paths began with ends unknown,
Twilight loomed in daylight’s stead.

Soft as waves of summer seas

Flowing on a lonely strand,
Rolled along that wall of trees
Shining waves of meadow-land;
Bright as founts of lighted spray
Tossed against a rocky ledge,
Banks of primrose, boughs of May
Fringed the forest’s sombre edge.

Here the wild domain began

Touched not by the hand of man,
Tangled, orderless, o’er-grown,
Tended not nor reaped nor sown,
Yet majestically decked
In the robes of its neglect,
With the forms that beauty shaped
Out of its confusion draped:—
Beauty that our youthful eyes
Sought not, but in other guise
Reached us, and before our feet
With a reassurance sweet,
When the path was dark and drear
Into wonder changed our fear.
Soon the spirit of the woods
Made us creatures of its own