ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL, BUT
SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS
The distortions of language incident to twentieth-century tyrannies of both right and left are, as much as anything else, the theme of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which Orwell published in 1949, just a year before his death. The year 1984 was thirty-five years in the future when the book first appeared. Shivers of fearful anticipation ran up and down the spines of well-meaning readers at the thought that in no more than a single generation democracy and freedom might disappear from the world, to be replaced by a subtly all-pervasive tyranny in which Big Brother watches everyone all the time and words are used to lie to the people rather than to tell them the truth.
In Nineteen Eighty-Four torture is endemic—the torture inflicted on the hero at the end of the book is indescribable as well as unbearable, even in the imagination. No big wars have occurred, but small, carefully controlled wars between “client” peoples are continuously being waged in far-off places, where weapons can be tested and the industrial surplus wasted, as it must be to ensure economic health at home. A rigid control of speech and behavior is effected by “Thought Police,” and even sex is considered by the authorities to be somehow illegitimate, doubtless because of the freedom implicit in its joyful exercise. All of this is justified publicly by “Newspeak,” the shared language of dictators around the Earth, and there is no hope of any change ever again. This is the way the world will end, said Orwell, and many believed him.
As I write this, it is already 2007; as you read, it is 2008 or later. The millions who read and shivered over Nineteen Eighty-Four a generation ago now remember only the name of the book, as well as a sense of irremediable doom about it, and most of them assume, rather cheerily, that Orwell was as wrong as the rest of those prophets. The year 1984 has come and gone, but not the way he said it would.
Or has it? What government ever even tries to tell the truth to its people anymore? Is not torture endemic everywhere in the world? No great war has occurred, but what about Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Iraq—did not Orwell get them right? If sex is comparatively free in the United States, it is certainly not in many countries, and Thought Police under other names restrict personal liberty in every corner of the globe. As for Newspeak—well, the more familiar with that we become, the less we notice it. But in fact many of us do notice it, because as I write, our own president is a master of it.
T.H. WHITE
1906–1964
The Once and Future King
Terence Hanbury White, born in Bombay, India, in 1906, was educated at Cheltenham College and at Cambridge. After completing his university studies he taught at Stowe School from 1930 to 1936. In the latter year he published an autobiographical volume, England Have My Bones, the critical success of which (it did not sell many copies) prompted him to resign from school teaching and to devote himself entirely to writing and studying the Arthurian legends.
He became progressively more reclusive as he grew older. From 1939 to 1945, he isolated himself in Ireland, and after 1945 lived in almost total seclusion on the Channel Island of Alderney. He emerged in 1960 to oversee the production of the Broadway musical “Camelot,” based on The Once and Future King. For a year or so it was, for White as well as for others (including Jack and Jackie Kennedy), a real-life Camelot, but when the president was killed, White returned to his seclusion, by then a wealthy man. He died in Greece in 1964.
The Once and Future King, published in 1958, comprises four novels, written over a ten-year period starting in 1939: The Sword in the Stone, The Queen of Air and Darkness, The Ill-Made Knight, and Candle in the Wind.
The four books tell the story of King Arthur and his Round Table, of his Queen, and of Lancelot, his brilliant but faithless follower, from the beginning of Arthur’s life until the end. The beginning is the best, as it often is in human lives. The Sword in the Stone is, more than anything else, about the education of the once and future king. His teacher is Merlyn, the seer and magician. But his most proximate teachers are the animals that Merlyn chooses as instructors for his charge.
At first, it must be admitted, Arthur does not know he is Arthur, or a king. He is called Wart, and he lives the very ordinary life of a very ordinary English boy of long ago. Merlyn soon begins to mentor him. They go out into the courtyard of the castle and stand by the fish pond. Wart most emphatically does not want to be educated. “I wish I was a fish,” he says. And suddenly he is a fish, a perch, swimming rather clumsily at first in the moat of the castle. He calls to Merlyn to come with him, and this time Merlyn does. “But in future you will have to go by yourself. Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.”
Merlyn takes the young perch to meet Mr. P, as they call him, the great pike, four feet long, who is the King of the Moat. “You will see what it is to be a king,” Merlyn explains.
The lesson is terrifying. I shall not spoil it.
Merlyn also turns the boy into a hawk, and Wart receives another lesson in the meaning of power, mercilessness, and fear. He becomes a badger, and after that an ant, living in an ants’ nest in all the corridors of which there is a notice which says: EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY. That explains very well the life of the ant.
Finally he becomes an owl, then a wild goose. Gooseness is perhaps the best lesson of all.
In his seclusion White kept a strange collection of pets—animals, birds, fish, insects. He knew a great deal about birds and published a book about the goshawk. On the whole, he probably preferred animals to men. There is merit in that view, though it is not wholly healthy or correct.
At the end of The Once and Future King the old king, who is very close to death, remembers the education Merlyn gave him.
Merlyn had taught him about animals so that the single species might learn by looking at the problems of the thousands. He remembered the belligerent ants, who claimed their boundaries, and the pacifist geese, who did not. He remembered his lesson from the badger … He saw the problem before him as plain as a map. The fantastic thing about war was that it was fought about nothing—literally nothing. Frontiers were imaginary lines.