The Never End by John Reed: The Other Orwell, the Cold War, the CIA, MI6, and the origin of Animal Farm – a review by Ben Tripp


John Reed’s recent collection of essays regarding George Orwell poses more than just a foil to chip away/contrast the Cold War maestro’s legacy: The Never End is also—despite it’s outrageous pricetag ($137.99!?) and artless treatment by Palgrave Macmillan—a nuanced, colorful micro-history and guided tour through some of the most vibrant landscapes of alternative publishing in the United States over the past twenty-five-or-so years. In an interview with Betty Rawson online for The Rumpus that’s included here from 2016, Reed recalls his first encounters with Orwell as a student in 1970s New York City public schools, where the novella Animal Farm was unthinkingly sacrosanct as mandatory reading: “I was taught that this was about the Russians and how shitty they were. I was also shown that the other animals were dumb and the pigs were smart…” And again, later interviewed by Jordan Rothacker for Literary Hub, Reed continued, “[Animal Farm] was presented to me in the context of the Cold War,” (which is a term many forget Orwell himself actually coined at the end of World War II, in his essay “You and the Atomic Bomb,” published in the British magazine Tribune) “I would read the book and be shown the CIA animation for explanation—and it’s to be expected that a child would then try to use the propaganda against the propagandists.” It was like Top 40 pop music, or even ‘muzak’, being piped in to all kinds of public places and work environments, dogwhistle-ing, indoctrination: “…a tool to quash the radical impulse, to instruct would-be reformers in the philosophy of political and cultural resignation,” Reed writes.  

In 2002, the same year that saw the publication of Christopher Hitchens’ mainstream book-length biographical essay Why Orwell Matters, Reed also published his own unofficial parodic sequel to Animal Farm called Snowball’s Chance, collaborating with the iconoclast experimental poetry press Roof Books in New York City. Reed’s novel caused a remarkable backlash, which included Hitchens’ public outing of Reed; saying that he was a “Bin Ladenist.” There was additionally vociferous criticism from the Orwell estate.  This was one of Reed’s early succèses de scandale—a literary satirist’s dream come true—firmly establishing him as a fresh, albeit perhaps abrasive at times, new voice within the hallowed realm of Orwell monomania. As Never End recounts, Reed would go on to affably challenge Hitchens in public on multiple occasions: first, introducing himself from the audience at the latter’s packed lecture at Cooper Union that same year, near the skyline of Reed’s childhood, near where he grew up and still lives; and this was also in the wake of the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. The two men then debated on TV with the BBC at Hitchens’ behest. However, Reed realizes today upon reflection some twenty-some years later, how “…this bickering was little more than the forced (toxic) masculinity that Orwell practiced.” Indeed, Hitchens’ vested interest in the matter may have resulted more from his agenda to cast the the Bush Era War on Terror as a sort of new Cold War against the Islamic world. 

These real-life and sometimes even personal anecdotes are all well-woven into the more scholarly intricacies of Never End, making the essays certainly more enjoyable than they might be in another more pedantic or academically detached writer’s hands. At that time in the early ’00 aughties, Reed said, “My intention is to blast Orwell, I’m really doing my best to annihilate him.” These days, he wonders if his delivery wasn’t a bit shrill. We discover if we didn’t know already, in Never End, that Orwell did collaborate with The British Secret Service and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, he named names and also stole some of his best ideas for stories…namely, from the relatively unsung Ukrainian author Nikolai Kostomarov, and their long short-story from 1879 (first published in 1917 in Russian) “Animal Riot: Letter from a Little Russian Landowner to His Friend in St. Petersburg” which Reed’s book now obligingly provides the full text of, translated into English by Tanya Paperny. The similarities in plot, and the characters, are remarkable, but in no way damning. As Reed notes in Never End, Orwell never really claimed to be original. That was not among his top priorities. He probably simply read the story and, in a way, was really just paying tribute to it by expanding it into a novel. Maybe he simply forgot to mention it? They are different enough works, and from different time periods, but Orwell was certainly aware. 

The Never End also candidly fesses up to its own rather sentimental attachment to the idea of writer as hero-patriarch, “which was so principal to the mythos of George Orwell and his imitators and acolytes,” Reed acknowledges. There is fearful symmetry with Reed’s own self-branding & self-fashioning over the years as the “…reluctant hero, a lone-wolf voice, a man of ethics standing alone in a storm of hypocrisy.” So it’s pleasantly surprising to read a book as honest as this, which rears up before our assumptions like some feat of post-modern architect à la The Centre Pompidou museum in Paris, vividly flaunting its very plumbing and inner-workings up-front & on the outside. There is perhaps still a tinge of arrogance among these latest pages, and it may be a tough pill to swallow for Orwell fans, but Reed also does eloquently and generously show how, even if old furious George truly might’ve been more of a cop and a rat than most of us are willing to admit, there is nevertheless always that kernel of non-conformity and truth-telling within the best of Orwell’s writings that will always warrant, and even reward, another look.