The Brooklyn Rail

The Never End is prolific author John Reed’s incisive and provocative new scholarship on George Orwell, the culmination of decades-long meticulous research, probing of key figures in Orwellian studies, and self-interrogation through engaging interviews, critical essays, and whimsical cartoons. We delve deep into Orwell’s furtive collaboration with the CIA in promoting “the American way” and his heavy borrowings from “Animal Riot” by Nikolai Kostomarov in writing his eponymous novel. In “roasting Orwell’s pigs,” Reed calls Snowball’s Chance, his own seminal critique and retelling of Orwell’s Animal Farm in the context of post-9/11 America as a “stupid knock off.” This self-deprecation is characteristic of Reed’s satirical writing style, because in The Never End I find a highly intelligent deep dive into the “empty consumerism, income inequality and monopoly capitalism” that followed the empty utopian promise of 1960s America. Readers will find in Reed a lone hero who guides them to reconsider the legacy of Animal Farm and Orwell as its writer.

John Reed is the prolific and widely published author of A Still Small Voice; The Whole; 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 Magazine, 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 Supplement, 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 in New York City.

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

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

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

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

Rail: The idea of collaboration in research is fascinating, in the sense that these discoveries were made possible through a flow of ideas. Do Orwell scholars typically get together and host conferences? Or not so much?

Reed: There is an Orwell conference, yes! I’ve never been, thinking I wouldn’t be well-received, but that may no longer be the case. Academic collaboration is not something I knew much about when I began working with the Orwell tangle, but now, I do feel it. When you work on a subject and present information it is very quickly metabolized. Especially, oddly enough, when it’s true. I’ll give an example. When I worked on A Drama in Time, a book concerned with the history of the New School, I came up against the question of James Baldwin, who has always been named as a once student of the New School, but whose presence here was questioned by current New School professors. We did find plenty of concrete evidence that he was here, and that we published, but the more gossipy/thrilling discovery is that while he was taking classes here he lived with Marlon Brando in what looked like a friends with benefits situation. We couldn’t publish that because we didn’t have real evidence, but I couldn’t resist telling people about it at the very first meeting, 10 a.m. the next morning, and at 3 p.m. that afternoon someone came screaming into my office saying “John, guess what I just heard!” Now I hear about Brando and Baldwin all the time, and I’ve even been provided some corroborating evidence. It’s just like, hmm, it’s in the water.

Rail: I am curious about the inclusion of Snowball’s Chance, written in the two weeks following 9/11, 2001. You describe in a footnote how the critique of Snowball’s Chance on copyright concerns fails to mention that Animal Farm is in turn based on “Animal Riot” by Nikolai Kostomarov (published in 1917). They say imitation is the highest form of praise. Is the difference from “Animal Riot” to Animal Farm versus Animal Farm to Snowball’s Chance that it is clear that one is a plagiarized piece while the other is a critique?

Reed: Yes. Haha. Orwell’s is a massive renovation of a very good idea. Kostomarov’s work is brilliant in conception, and mediocre in realization. Orwell takes a great concept and revises in the way that only a fine writer can. He knew what to do. Is it bad that he rewrote “Animal Riot”? Well the question of copyright is mired in complexity. There was no copyright when Shakespeare was writing, which is largely what allowed for his works. Did Orwell “take more than he gave”? In contemporary Western legal terms, yes.

In terms of Snowball’s Chance, I’d say it’s pretty clearly parody: Communism to Capitalism, yes, but I’d also point to the language. I tried to mimic Orwell’s style in a really overt way. Kind of paternalistic Western journalism on steroids. I understood that I was sacrificing a little readability to get there, so it was an area I was actively engaging as I worked.

Rail: Now I’m curious. How do you on a craft level mimic his style? By that, I mean do you write and then re-write? Or do the ideas come formed dripping with paternalistic Western journalism-speak?

Reed: I think there’s an underlying musicality to a prose style or an accent or a dialect or whatever. For Orwell, I wanted to find that fairy-tailish voice and put a thumping beat behind it. You know when you hear a cover of an old song that sounds more like the original than the original? But also maybe is a little tongue in cheek?

Rail: How do you decide which pieces written over the course of several decades to include in The Never End?

Reed: There were some that were just too irritating to me. I had a crisis when I first looked at the collection. That early stuff is irritating! But then I came to accept that that was part of the history, the literary history. Hitchens, writing about the subject, from my perspective, was way more irritating than me, and he was nonsensical, and when he did make sense he was wrong, and when he was charming he was drunk.

Rail: Do you ever censor yourself in speaking about other folks in the field? Christopher Hitchens, may he rest in peace, obviously can’t exactly get back at you. Or is that against the spirit of the researcher/ artist?

Reed: I censor myself all the time. But I don’t think I do when it comes to those Orwell guys. And they do not like me. [Laughs] Their kind of BS is indicative of the partisan mess we’re in. Wait, hmm, I’ll grab a graph:

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.)

Rail: What is the thought process in including your cartoons in The Never End? I am curious about the line drawing (which creates an impression of spontaneity and quickness) which contrasts with the multi-year and tedious research process which goes into the other pieces that are included.

Reed: That’s exactly what I was thinking! I really wanted to put some levain into what felt like a pretty dense bit of baking.

Rail: Amazing, we’re on the same page. I really enjoyed the drawings! Ultimately, how do you think you fit within the Orwellian timeline?

Reed: Maybe if I’m lucky a footnote? But I might get a few graphs if the timeline were a wall of prose?

Rail: Has Orwell studies shaped your own creative output? For instance, do you find the Orwellian archetypes of the proletariat and the ruling class in your work? How about structure or other craft techniques on the sentence-level?

Reed: Animal Farm had a deep impact on me as a kid. I still struggle to shake its cynicism. Orwell could be a real downer, and I guess I could be that too. He could be such a cop. I really don’t do well when people act like they’re policing me. That’s my own nonsense. Orwell sounded so British, and I have thought a lot about what it means to be from my own country, New York. Sentence to sentence, I’m always thinking about that.

Rail: As a fellow New Yorker, I get exactly what you mean with New York as country. What are you working on today?

Reed: A new collection of sonnets! I’m rolling them out in their sequence on instagram now. I love comments. :) @easyreeder