Epilogue: And Sonia
February 19th, 1953
Found the P.M. absorbed in George Orwell’s book, 1984.
‘Have you read it, Charles? Oh, you must. I’m reading it for a second time. It is a very remarkable book.’ – Lord Moran, Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival 1940–1965 (1966)
‘G. Orwell dead,’ Evelyn Waugh wrote to his friend Nancy Mitford late in January 1950, ‘and Mrs Orwell presumably a rich widow.’ Orwell died young. Many of his friends survived him for nearly half a century. A few of them survive him still. Cyril Connolly lived on into his seventies; Julian Symons into his eighties; Anthony Powell into his nineties. On the most basic level the effect that Orwell had on their lives can be glimpsed in the books they wrote after his death. Paul Potts’ rambling memoirs are full of scraps of remembered conversation, hoarded across the years. In his conscience-of-a-generation role, Orwell makes several appearances in Symons’ collection of imaginary character sketches Portraits of the Missing (1991), brought in for example to denounce the wartime political opportunist ‘Rupert Loxley’ on the grounds that ‘If the Germans were in power and the right sort of people were going to the parties they gave, your friend Loxley would be there too. He’d call it accepting reality, something like that.’ The three volumes of Anthony Powell’s Journals, produced in his Somersetshire-bound old age, are full of shrewd reflections on ‘George’, George’s undoubted taste for power and what George might have thought. Orwell’s books sold in their millions, the writer acquired an almost mythic status in the public imagination, but the man himself stayed green in their memory. Connolly’s reviews of the pieces of Orwelliana that came his way in the decade or so before his death in 1974 are stalked by the ghost of Orwell’s personality, and a relationship that began ‘with his comments on a poem I wrote when I was thirteen on the death of Lord Kitchener and ends with the label on a basket of fruit sent to University College Hospital in 1949’.
Avril Blair, clearly invigorated by the open-air life of the Inner Hebrides, married Bill Dunn a year or so after her brother’s death. The two of them moved to another property on Jura and made themselves responsible for Richard’s upbringing and education; Avril continuing to keep a vigilant eye on the misrepresentations of biographers. As early as June 1950 she wrote to David Astor, apropos an article by Tosco Fyvel in the World Review, complaining that ‘this insistence on Eric’s unhappiness at school, & the unsuitability of his education, is a reflection on our parents, who, in actual fact, made every kind of sacrifice to give him what they thought & hoped would be a good education’. Avril died in 1978.
Of all those affected in one way or another by Orwell’s death, it was Sonia on whom his legacy placed the heaviest burden. Unprepared for the late-night news from the hospital, guilty at not having been present, she was inconsolable. Janetta Kee, whom she contacted early the following morning, remembered her being ‘in the most terrible … appalling state’. Sonia’s unfeigned grief won over several of Orwell’s friends who had previously regarded her influence with faint suspicion. Muggeridge, for instance, wrote that he would always love her for her ‘true tears’.
At an early stage – there was something uncomfortably prescient in Waugh’s remark – opinions of Sonia split up into two implacably opposed camps. To her friends, a distinguished array of literary and artistic notables picked up in the forty years between her Euston Road debut and her death in 1980, she was a loyal custodian of her husband’s memory, an unobtrusive supporter of good causes and deserving cases, good-natured – despite well-attested bouts of fractiousness – and well-meaning. To her enemies – a category which includes at least two Orwell biographers – she was simply a gold-digger who spent the material rewards of a relationship conducted across a deathbed on three decades’ self-indulgence. In these contending hands even the events surrounding Orwell’s death have acquired a dreadful symbolic significance. Where exactly was she, for example, at the moment Orwell died? According to Michael Shelden’s biography of 1991, in a nightclub with Lucian Freud and their mutual friend Ann Dunn. And yet the image of the carefree socialite, carousing into the small hours while her husband haemorrhaged to death half a mile away, has been endlessly denied. According to Ann Dunn she and Freud had dined together and then invited Sonia, exhausted from a day at the hospital, to join them at a small supper club opposite her flat in Percy Street. Sonia then telephoned the hospital and returned ‘in a state of shock’ to report that Orwell was dead. The same starkly opposed views attend the holiday she took in the south of France shortly afterwards. To Shelden this involved ‘chasing her lover on the Riviera’, but it was remembered by Janetta Kee, who accompanied her, as ‘very humble and low key’.
Whatever may be said about Sonia, she was a diligent guardian of Orwell’s interests – ‘assiduous in her attention to every detail in the considerable amount of work involved in the administration of Orwell’s affairs’, according to the literary agent who succeeded Leonard Moore in charge of the Orwell estate. As for the proceeds, Sonia’s conspicuous generosity towards other writers, and on occasion their dependants, stemmed from the conviction that the money was held on trust, that her duty to Orwell was to lay out his posthumous income in ways of which he would have approved. When Francis King remarked on the care lavished on the late J.R. Ackerley’s sister Nancy, including the redecoration of her flat, she commented, ‘Well, the money isn’t really mine.’ She was a notable supporter of Jean Rhys, paying for her to stay in hotels, quietly supplying her wants and often passing off her own kindnesses as other people’s. Beyond the good works she made a not inconsiderable contribution – a form of words her late husband would have hated – to the cultural world of her time, working as an editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, where she has some claims to have discovered the novelist Nigel Dennis, co-editing the Paris-based journal Art and Literature and putting in long hours of work on the four-volume 1968 edition of Orwell’s Collected Journalism, Letters and Essays. The aspiring talents she encouraged were always grateful for her interest while occasionally disposed to mock her in print. Angus Wilson, for example, who caricatured her mercilessly in Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (1956), was careful to acknowledge a debt. It was to Cyril Connolly, he later noted, ‘and his then secretary, Sonia Brownell, that I owe my first appearance in print’.
Beneath the volatility, the imperiousness and the occasional starring performance as ‘the widow Orwell’ lay a rather unhappy woman: warm-hearted, passionate, impulsive, but also fraught, insensitive and fond of one drink too many. Emotionally there were great cracks and crevices into which the unwary could tumble. Several people have remarked her nervousness in the company of heterosexual men. Her male dinner guests, Francis King remembered, were invariably either homosexual or safely uxorious. There was a brief and unfortunate second marriage in 1958 to Michael Pitt-Rivers, who had spent eighteen months in prison for some widely-publicised homosexual offences. Frances Partridge’s mid-1960s diaries contain bracing accounts of Sonia in action. Watching her as she conversed with the other guests at Charleston and noting the ‘safe’ artistic preferences expressed, Partridge complained that her mind worked ‘in such a boring, intensely conventional way’. In November 1965 Sonia collapsed dead drunk on the floor at Janetta’s. A conversation, or rather monologue, into which the diarist found she could scarcely interject a word, produced the following reflection: ‘I’ve never been so browbeaten, bossed and bully-ragged in my life … I can only think she hadn’t a clue about what I feel about her, that I really despise her pretentiousness, and now had added to my picture of her a full awareness of her crude, raw, arrogant, insensitive bossyness.’ Happily all this was ‘so awful’ as to be almost funny.
Towards the end it all went badly wrong. For reasons which none of her friends could really understand, but apparently urged on by her accountants, she fetched up in Paris – ill, separated from her friends, and strangely hard-up. According to the novelist David Plante ‘there was something manic in the move, as if Paris were a solution to a problem which had no other solution’. Friends were informed that she intended to get a job working for a French publisher, but no one understood why she should be living in self-imposed exile. Neither could anyone understand why she was short of money. For many years Orwell’s financial affairs had been in the hands of George Orwell Productions, a company formed immediately before his death and administered by his long-term accountant Jack Harrison of the firm of Harrison, Son, Hill & Co. In the 1970s, when according to Secker & Warburg the annual income from Orwell’s foreign sales regularly topped six figures, Sonia’s monthly allowance was £750. Increasingly ill – she was later diagnosed with cancer – Sonia spent her declining years in pursuit of legal redress for what she imagined was embezzlement. Her state of mind became desperate. ‘Once I win – and I’ve put everything I’ve got into winning – I’ll kill myself,’ she once said. In the event she died of natural causes, late in 1980, with Bernard Crick’s biography, which she hated, in the bookshops. The court case was settled shortly before. Most of the money turned out to have been lost by the accountants in inept investments. Visiting her in hospital and staring at her gaunt, distorted face, Plante kissed her, whereupon she burst into tears and suddenly ‘looked very beautiful’. After her death the solicitor informed her friend Hilary Spurling that there was barely enough money left to pay for the funeral.
Writing up his diary on 17 December 1980, after attending the ceremony at the Roman Catholic church in Cadogan Street, Stephen Spender thought about his dead friend. Remembering Sonia as the beauty of the pre-war Euston Road, he recalled an impression of ‘someone always struggling to go beyond herself, to escape from her social background, the convent where she was educated, into some pagan paradise of artists and “geniuses” who would save her’. Passionate loyalties contended with passionate disloyalty, the result, he believed, of people falling short of the ideals she had conceived of them. ‘She had a feeling, perhaps, with some people, that she’d invented them, and they’d jolly well better recognise this.’ Under the veneer of sophistication, she was not in the least sophisticated. People understood this, but no one knew what lay beneath this second layer of innocence. What did Sonia want? No one had ever found out, Spender concluded. The likeliest answer was ‘the love of a great and maligned genius’ whose honour she could defend. Did she ever obtain it? As in so much surrounding Sonia, let alone the man who had pre-deceased her thirty years before, there is no answer.