Rejection Letter
I think you split your vote, without getting any compensating stronger adhesion from either party—i.e. those who criticise Russian tendencies from the point of view of a purer communism, and those who, from a very different point of view, are alarmed about the future of small nations. And after all, your pigs are far more intelligent than the other animals, and therefore the best qualified to run the farm—in fact, there couldn’t have been an Animal Farm at all without them: so that what was needed, (someone might argue), was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs.
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2016/01/dear-orwell.html?m=1
Indeed, those intelligent, public-spirited pigs are natural leaders. What would we do without them?
So Elliot didn't dare to eat that peach, then?
This was right before Orwell was "red-baited", and his work was never published again.
Mind you, Orwell did a fair amount of "redbaiting" of his own...he caused a lot of people to be blacklisted from working at the BBC because they were or had been Party members.
I admire his writing(he was independent Left, not a conservative, despite frequent right-wing appropriation of his works) but he did have his own hypocrisies and shortcomings.
If a writer isn't disliked by everyone s/he probably isn't doing his or her job.
And swallow. No, not surprising.