Warburg and the Making of George Orwell
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, Orwell’s great damning satire on the Russian Revolution, first appeared 75 years ago – on 17 August 1945. The publisher was Fredric Warburg (1898-1981) whose role in promoting Orwell’s writings over many years and in the development, more broadly, of progressive ideas in post-war Europe cannot be understated.
Warburg was a scholarship boy at Westminster School. Intriguingly, after he visited Orwell at Cranham sanatorium in June 1949, Orwell decided to enrol his son, Richard, to this school. Previously, he had enrolled him to Eton but grew to detest their dress code. ‘They have abandoned their top hats, I learn. It is a day school, which I prefer & I think has other good points,’ Orwell wrote to Julian Symons about Westminster.
Warburg describes Secker and Warburg, formed with Roger Senhouse in 1935, in his autobiography, All Authors Are Equal (1973), as ‘a midget firm, fragile as bone china’. He adds: ‘My revolutionary urges were to be expressed in the publishing sphere, for I never joined any political group or party.’ And around the company he assembled ‘a miscellaneous collection of socialists, anarchists, radicals, independent socialists, pacifists and eccentrics’.
In its early years, the firm was consistently unprofitable but quickly published H. G. Wells, Thomas Mann, André Gide and Lewis Mumford. In 1937, it brought out This Was Their Youth, the second novel by Ralph Fox who went on to fight with the International Brigades in Spain and who died fighting in the defence of Madrid.
Then in 1938, after Orwell’s publisher Victor Gollancz, objecting to his support for the leftist POUM militia and the anarchists during the Spanish civil war, turned down Homage to Catalonia, his remarkable eye-witness account of fighting on the frontline, Warburg stepped in. He was recommended to Orwell by Fenner Brockway, a leader of the Independent Labour Party, who had earlier given him the accreditation to serve with the POUM militia. The relationship Orwell went on to develop with Warburg and Senhouse was to prove one of the most important and fruitful of his writing life.
Senhouse’s role should not be under-estimated. He ran the company with Warburg for almost 30 years, so yet another old-Etonian (along with David Astor, A. J. Ayer, Cyril Connolly, Andrew Gow, Denys King-Farlow, L. H. Myers and Richard Rees) at the heart of Orwell’s career. Warburg says of him in his autobiography: ‘At times he seemed larger than life, buoyant, audacious and hyper-active. His rages, when he was roused, were uninhibitedly magnificent. … He was one of the best copy editors and proof readers I have ever known. Above all, he had the important ability to convince many that Secker and Warburg was a distinguished firm with a future.’
Warburg took a brave gamble with Homage (personally, one of my Orwellian favourites) and in the short term it did not pay off. Of the 1,500 copies printed, around 700 were sold so there were still copies in stock when it was reprinted in 1951 as part of the Uniform Edition. And it was not brought out in the US until 1952.
Warburg and Orwell in the Home Guard (back row, 2R and R)
British Library/UCL
Warburg served in the same Home Guard unit based in St John’s Wood, London, as a corporal under Sergeant Blair during the war years – and actually turned down publication of his War Diaries. But he introduced Orwell to a wide range of contacts – including Tosco Fyvel, Arthur Koestler and H. G. Wells – some of them to become important friends and colleagues. For instance, Fyvel and Orwell became joint editors of a series of Secker and Warburg pamphlets called ‘Searchlight Books’ – Orwell’s contribution being The Lion and the Unicorn, in 1941, which sold over 10,000 copies. The first part ‘England Your England’ (the title a deliberate variant of D. H. Lawrence’s ‘England My England’) begins, famously: ‘As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.’ Other books in the series were by Sebastian Haffner, Ritchie Calder, T. C. Worsley, Arturo Barea, Joyce Carey, Bernard Causton, Olaf Stapledon and Stephen Spender. But after Warburg’s printers in Portsmouth were destroyed in a 1942 bomb attack, the series was closed down.
Warburg’s role, next, in the publication of Animal Farm is to prove crucial. In 1944, the manuscript is rejected by four publishers concerned over its implicit attack on the Soviet Union, then a close ally in the war against the Nazis. The Ministry of Information turns down Jonathan Cape’s request – but it emerges that the chief censor there is Peter Smollett, later revealed to be a Soviet spy. At Faber, T. S. Eliot (who in 1931 rejected Down and Out in London and Paris) objects, somewhat obtusely, to the representation of the animals: ‘What was needed was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.’ After rejection letters arrive from publishers William Collins and André Deutsch, Orwell turns to his friend Paul Potts who runs the Whitman Press, a small anarchist imprint. For this edition, Orwell pens an eight-page Introduction. But then Warburg agrees to publish in March 1945 and the Introduction is ditched. The Introduction is later to be discovered by Senhouse buried amongst his papers and published in 1972 as ‘The Freedom of the Press’.
The question remains: why did not Orwell take the manuscript to Warburg in the first place? According to biographer Bernard Crick: ‘The answer must lie in Orwell’s confidence in the merit of the book and his desire to see it published by one of the two best publishing houses in England. … Secker and Warburg, before their faith in Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Orwell had paid off, looked a very different house – small, lively but precarious and still nicknamed, however unfairly, because of their courage and persistence in bringing out difficult left-wing books “the Trotskyite publisher”.’
Moreover, at the time of the publication of Animal Farm, Warburg gave Orwell important personal support. As biographer Gordon Bowker comments: ‘Warburg wrote later that as soon as he read the book he realised that he had a major work on his hands. Orwell was less certain and quite apprehensive about how his old enemies the Stalinists would react to it.’
Orwell’s commitment to accuracy is perhaps best shown in a letter about Animal Farm – just about to be published – he sent to Senhouse in March 1945 from Paris, where he was reporting on the final days of the war for Astor’s Observer and the Manchester Evening News. When in Chapter 8 the windmill is destroyed, Orwell originally wrote ‘… all the animals including Napoleon flung themselves on their faces’. He now asks for this to be changed to ‘all the animals except Napoleon…’ since he wants to be fair to Stalin who did stay in Moscow during the German advance. Warburg comments: ‘To me this single sentence throws as much light on Orwell’s character as any I know.’
Orwell’s Critical Essays, including those on Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Koestler, the sexy seaside postcards of Donald McGill and P. G. Wodehouse, was published by Warburg in 1946. According to Bowker, this book ‘aroused more interest in literary circles than Animal Farm. It was widely reviewed by many leading thinkers of the day, including some of Orwell’s friends’.
Warburg is probably best known for his support to Orwell in his final years – and in the publication of his dystopian, best-selling masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. It first appeared in bookshops on 8 June 1949, a first edition of 25,575 copies with further printings of 5,000 in the following March and August. Indeed, it was Warburg and his wife who recommended a friend of theirs, Dr Andrew Morland, a consultant physician at University College Hospital and expert on tuberculosis, to treat Orwell while he stayed at Cranham sanatorium, in the Cotswolds, from January to September 1949. Morland was one of the last doctors to be seen by D. H. Lawrence in the south of France in 1929-30 – though Lawrence considered his advice poor and grumbled to friends about it.
At Orwell’s funeral service, at Christ Church, Albany Street, London NW1, on 26 January 1950, Warburg greeted the mourners at the door. Biographer Michael Shelden records Inez Holden remembering him saying over and over: ‘How good of you to come.’
With its financial position devastated by paper shortages during and after the war, Secker and Warburg joined the Heinemann publishing group in 1952. Warburg’s list continued to be innovative and daring including authors such as Simone de Beauvoir, Colette, Alberto Moravia, Günter Grass and Angus Wilson. He even published in 1956 The Third Eye, supposedly written by Tuesday Lobsang Rampa about his mystical experiences while growing up in Tibet. It became a global best-seller but in the following year the author was revealed to be none other than Cyril Henry Hoskin, the son of a village plumber in Devon.
Perhaps Warburg’s courage as a progressive intellectual is best seen in 1953 with his publication of The Philanderer, by the American Stanley Kauffmann. A brilliant dissection of the Don Juan complex, with all its misogyny, emotional poverty and self-hatred, it was judged obscene on the Isle of Man and banned. A scandal ensued, predictably, in the British press with the editor of the Daily Express describing it, for instance, as ‘calculated and deliberate pornography … as degraded an essay in salacity as I have ever read’. Warburg was duly charged with obscene libel – and risked jail if he lost the case.
Most publishers faced with such a charge admitted guilt, paid a token fine, withdrew the book and moved on. Not Warburg. He chose to send the case to trial by jury at the Old Bailey. There the prosecution presented the jury with all the allegedly salacious sections of the novel typed out on a sheet of paper. But then, in an unprecedented move, Mr Justice Stable ordered all jury members to be given a copy of the book and sent them away to read it in three days. In summing up, the Judge said pornography certainly exists: any adult can recognise it. But because it exists, should non-pornographers be restrained from writing as fully and as well as they can about contemporary life? Such a summing up was unprecedented. The jury spent 50 minutes in discussion and then ruled ‘not guilty’.
The importance of this case for freedom of expression and reforming the obscenity law in the UK has been totally overshadowed by the 1960 watershed trial of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, when the charge of obscenity was thrown out. But Warburg’s remarkable courage over The Philanderer was typical of the man.
Thus while Sylvia Topp’s recent excellent biography of Orwell’s first wife has thrown new light on Eileen Shaughnessy and her role in the making of the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is perhaps useful to remember that Orwell’s success would not have been possible without support from a wide range of friends, relatives and colleagues. So as we celebrate the anniversary of the publication of Animal Farm, let’s not forget Fred Warburg.
Richard Lance Keeble was chair of The Orwell Society from 2013 to 2020. His latest books are Journalism Beyond Orwell (Routledge 2020) and George Orwell, The Secret State and the Making of Nineteen Eighty-Four (Abramis, 2020)
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