I was first introduced to Sonia in Paris at the opening of an exhibition of paintings by a friend of hers. She wore a fur hat, and all the while she spoke to me, so rapidly I hardly understood her, she shoved her hat about her head. I hadn’t got her name, and had no idea who was speaking to me.
She seemed to be making rapid comments on a great many subjects: England, France, America.
She didn’t ask me any questions about myself, and I couldn’t ask her any about herself.
During brief pauses, she looked at me, and I thought she might suddenly walk away, then she continued to talk, that furious talk, which had nothing to do with her or me, but which seemed to be addressed to people standing about us, whom she also looked at starkly. She repeated herself a lot; whatever the subject was, she, I thought at one pause, had exhausted it, and I tried to think of something to say, but she went on, repeating herself over and over. Perhaps she remained with me because she didn’t want to leave me by myself in the crowded gallery, and she was repeating herself for lack of anything else to say. I hoped someone would come along and relieve her; but when someone did join us, instead of going off to others, Sonia stayed with us, and, shoving her hat so it almost tipped from her head, went on talking. After every brief pause, she said, as if she had heard someone contradicting her, “No, it is absolutely true that in England . . . in France . . . in America.”
Then, after a stark look at me, she said, “No, as George used to say . . .,” and, with the authority of this George, whom I didn’t know, she made a comment, and, her hands lifting her hat up and pulling it straight down so the fur was low over her forehead, her hard look seemed to soften as if she had, finally, stated her justification for all her chatter, and her look said, “You do know who George is, don’t you?” All I knew was that he gave her authority.
I nodded.
She went on talking.
At the centre of the gallery, the painter and some of his friends, drunk, were tearing open telegrams and dropping them to the parquet floor, and laughing.
It occurred to me that Sonia was also drunk.
When, later, I was told her name, and realized who George was, I tried to recall her chatter, but I couldn’t.
The day after the opening, I went with the painter and a party of extraordinary people, including Sonia, to lunch in a restaurant. I was wearing a cap with a narrow peak, and, on the way into the restaurant, before I could take it off, Sonia did; she kept it, and at the table put it on, then passed it to others, who put it on, until it came back to me.
Sonia was talking furiously. It might have been about the hat. I didn’t know what it was about. She spoke in French. She pulled her hair, disarranged it, and, to arrange it again, ran her fingers through it and shook her head. Her hair was light, and she was, of a certain age, beautiful. She spoke French as if it were her own possession, and she spoke it in a loud voice. She often mentioned le képi, but there was more, much more, than kepis in her talk.
A lot of bottles of wine were put on the table. Quickly drunk myself, I noticed that Sonia was drunk as quickly. She was never still, and seemed to be looking at and listening to everyone at the table, whenever anyone could talk. She would say, “Non, non, c’n’est pas ça, c’n’est pas ça du tout,” and, disarranging or arranging her hair, she’d say what it was.
There were Frenchmen in the party, and when one spoke in English, Sonia abruptly said to him, in French, “The French think they can speak any language they want, it doesn’t matter how badly, because only French counts. It may be true that only French counts, but knowing French is no excuse to speak other languages badly. You shouldn’t try to speak English, because you don’t know it. Really, people who try to speak languages they don’t know—” She emphasized this by jerking her head back, then forward, and saying, “Do you see?”
“Yes, Sonia, I see,” he said.
I thought: Everyone is being very tolerant of her.
But as Sonia went on in French, she made a mistake, and the Frenchman corrected her; she went on in English.
Her English was louder than her French. To one person or another she’d say, “How ridiculous! It’s not like that at all! How utterly ridiculous!” No one objected to this; it was as though she were an overactive, perhaps frenzied relative at a big family luncheon; everyone was used to her, and tolerant. I imagined at times that she was saying about the luncheon itself, “How ridiculous,” and no one said it wasn’t, because perhaps it was.
Back in London, Sonia rang me to invite me to dinner.
I was early, and, alone in her drawing room, studied the furniture, the pictures, the books, the vase of chrysanthemums on a small, round, highly polished table which reflected the flowers. The room was bright and orderly. She came in, looking bright and orderly herself, and she moved about at quick, sharp angles as she talked.
When others arrived, she asked if I would prepare the drinks they asked for.
She introduced me as a young writer; I was twenty-five, and had published nothing. She introduced me to people whom I had known only as names, and who, I’d imagined, only existed in their names; suddenly, they had bodies—some had very large and some very small bodies—and I was drinking with them, then sitting about a round dining-room table with them. I walked home, through the clear early fall night, drunk, and imagining that the houses were books, and Sonia was opening the doors of the houses like book covers, introducing me into literary London.
At a luncheon to which I was asked by three of her old friends, they discussed happy and unhappy people; unable to say who was a really happy person, they all agreed that Sonia Orwell was the unhappiest.
A glass of wine in my hand, as I wandered about a big reception given at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, Sonia grabbed my sleeve and pulled me towards her. She said, “You must help me.” Holding my sleeve, she pulled me through the crowd, in which everyone had a glass of red or white wine, to a narrow partition. She said, nodding, “There, on that side, is So-and-so with his girl friend, and there, on that side,” and she nodded towards the other side, “is his wife. Now, we must talk to the wife and keep her distracted.” We went. To distract the wife, I didn’t have to do much; Sonia did it all.
Sonia, I thought, knew what everyone was up to.
She invited me again to her house for dinner. I arrived, just on time, with a bouquet of flowers. I kissed her and she thanked me, but when she stepped back I saw that hard look in her eyes.
Jokingly, I asked her about So-and-so and his girl friend and wife. She said, the hardness now in her voice, “That’s nothing to joke about. It’s a very sad affair, a very very sad affair, and not to be treated frivolously.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
My flowers in her hand, she said, “No one seems to understand what happens in human relationships, and the sadness of it all. It isn’t anything to joke about. It really isn’t.”
I began to sweat.
The bell rang, and she answered. While she went out with the flowers, I, sweating, tried to talk, in the drawing room, with the second guest. The last time I had been here, I had been made to feel at home; now I felt constrained, and, looking at the bottles and glasses and ice cube bucket and slices of lemon, thought I mustn’t presume to make myself a drink, as I didn’t presume to answer when the doorbell rang again. I saw Sonia go to answer.
I wondered what had happened to my flowers.
She introduced me to the first few guests, but, as the room filled with eight or ten of us, not to others. Sometimes I stood to the side and looked into the room; sometimes I turned away to look at the pictures.
I thought: What am I doing here?
At table, I tried to take my place in the talk, but most of it—as I discovered often happened in London—had to do with people I didn’t know. Whenever I did speak up, Sonia glared at me and said, “That’s silly.” I kept sweating. The small downstairs dining room was hot, and filled with cigarette smoke. Sonia smoked between courses. The conversation turned to a writer whose work I didn’t like, and I said something about it, and Sonia said to me harshly, almost shouting, “What do you know about writing?”
With a kind of amazement, I felt myself rise up from myself and stare down at myself at the table, and that disembodied self said, coldly, “You fool.”
Because I thought I must, I made efforts to be attentive and to talk, but the part of me above me stared down no matter how much I drank, and even as I walked home it said to me from above, “You stupid fool, what makes you think you have any right in that world?”
I made myself write Sonia a thank-you note.
I didn’t see her for some months. As I was entering a house in Hampstead for New Year’s Eve, I saw Sonia rush out from a side room to me, as though she had been waiting for me; she put out her cheeks, turning her face away, for me to kiss her, then stepped back, and spoke to me in very rapid French. For a moment, I wondered if she had mistaken me for someone else. She took me by the sleeve and pulled me into the side room, saying, all in French, that I must help her, that I would understand: at the party was a young woman who had been married to and divorced from a queer, and Sonia noticed that at the party the young woman had been talking for a long time to a nice, very straight man who showed signs of interest in her, but hadn’t gone so far as to ask her for a date; I was to flirt with the young woman so the nice, very straight man would become jealous and immediately ask her for a date. “You may be American,” Sonia said, “but you’re French by blood, and you understand these things.” I didn’t want to say: Hardly. Sonia introduced me and we all sat together, Sonia and the man in armchairs, the young woman and I on a sofa. Sonia spoke without stopping. She said, “They took away the drinking laws, everyone became an alcoholic; they took away the gambling laws, and everyone became a gambler; now they’re taking away the laws against homosexuals, and everyone is becoming queer.” Then she jumped up, grabbed me by the hand, and pulled me out of the room, saying, “Did you hear? Did you hear? He made a date with her.” I hadn’t heard. Sonia took me around the rest of the party.
We saw one another often. I went to her house for luncheon, tea, drinks, dinner. I continued to meet people, some of whom became friends. Sonia came to my small flat in Battersea for dinner.
Whenever I went to Sonia’s house I was apprehensive. Often, Sonia chose what I could only think of as a victim, usually a male; to whatever this guest said, Sonia responded, in French or English, “How ridiculous!” Sometimes I was the victim.
I would get home from an evening of being victimized, angry and depressed, and swear I’d never see Sonia again. The next morning, however, I’d ring her to say what a lovely dinner party she’d given, and how I longed to see her again soon.
She was able to produce in her parties an intimate sense of family reunion, as if everyone there was related and could join in the talk about those relatives who were absent. When did anyone last see So-and-so? At her house, Sonia could make one feel one had been taken into a large, peculiar family. On these evenings I would leave imagining I was a promising nephew in her large family.
We had luncheon, for the first time just the two of us together, in a small restaurant. She was talking, on and on, about a shelf in her bathroom which was on the point of collapsing. I had imagined that when I was alone with her our conversation would be intimate: we would talk about what we couldn’t talk about when we were with others. Perhaps I had wanted to talk to her about what I considered most relevant to a relationship: feelings and thoughts.
I said, “I wonder if I feel more isolated here in Europe than in America.”
She said, “You might as well ask if you’d feel isolated on Mars. The question doesn’t have much consequence. No, no. Don’t think about it.” She drew in on her cigarette. “Now, I’ve got to get that shelf put up properly, as I have some French house guests coming.”
I thought: All right, we’ll talk about the shelf.
“It probably needs rawl plugs to hold it up,” I said.
“Rawl plugs? What are they?”
I explained.
“How clever of you,” she said. “I didn’t think you were so clever. I thought there might be a reason for my liking you. And are rawl plugs difficult to put in?”
“I’d be pleased to put them in for you.”
“That really is too kind. Really, really. I’d give you lunch.”
We made a date for me to come to fix the falling shelf to the bathroom wall, and then I thought we’d get down to talking about what, to me, would give the luncheon its importance: I would tell Sonia a little about my inner world, and she would tell me a little about hers. But she went on talking about what else was needed for the shelf, and when we parted she said, “That was lovely,” and I wondered why she thought it lovely when nothing we’d talked about, it seemed to me, had been what I considered important.
After a large lunch in her kitchen, she showed me up to the bathroom with the collapsing shelf. She had bought a box of rawl plugs, and she had as well a hand drill, a masonry bit, a hammer, a screwdriver, as I’d asked, some brand new. I thought she would leave me, but she remained in the bathroom, talking as she watched me work. When I removed the shelf, plaster dust fell from the screw holes, which were too big for the rawl plugs, but I felt I couldn’t explain that, that that would have been too complicated, and, while Sonia talked, I went on working. I sweated. The shelf, when I got it up, wobbled.
Sonia said, “You are clever. Thank you so very very much.”
It was as if I had done her a great service for which she would never be able to repay me.
The rawl plugs became a term of our friendship.
Sometimes I was invited to parties by people she had introduced me to, and often I would find her at the party. Once, as I entered a room, I saw Sonia standing in front of the fireplace with the painter friend at whose show I had first met her in Paris. I went to them, but Sonia, her face drawn as with the fatigue of her seriousness, was too occupied with the painter to take me in, and she turned her back a little to me. I spoke to others. When the painter left, early, I saw that Sonia was standing alone, and I went to her again. She asked me to get her another glass of wine.
I was with her the whole evening, as I felt if I left her no one else would speak to her; and, also, she spoke about the painter so obsessively there was no way to break in upon her. The painter’s friend had died, perhaps killed himself, and Sonia talked about that. I kept fetching her glasses of wine, and she became very drunk. By nine-thirty, before the food was brought out, she was too drunk to stay. She was talking so quickly I imagined her talk would break through the human limits of talk and become something else. She lurched when she moved. I said I was going home, and could I give her a lift in a taxi? She followed me out. In the taxi, she went on talking, in a higher and higher pitched, accusing voice, about how unhappy the painter was.
“You don’t understand,” she said. “None of you understands what desperation is. You won’t help. I could kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill you all for your lack of sensitivity. He is suffering. Does any one of you care? Do you ring him up? Fuck all if you do.”
I had to contain my anger, and, getting out of the taxi, showed her to her door to make sure she got in. It was about ten o’clock, and instead of returning to the party I went home, feeling that, as I did not understand real desperation, I understood nothing. Sonia did understand.
I asked her to a dinner party to which I’d asked people I hadn’t met through her, people she didn’t know, or hardly knew. She arrived early; she’d been to a drinks party and was drunk. I gave her more to drink, and she, laughing in a hard, dry way, her head thrown back, told me she hadn’t wanted to come to a dinner party, had wanted to go home and to bed. As she laughed, I laughed, my laughter as hard and dry as hers. She said, “I hate dinner parties,” and laughed. I laughed.
I drank a lot.
A woman novelist came. Sonia was very attentive to her, and the moment the novelist put a cigarette between her lips, Sonia jumped across the room with a lit cigarette lighter for her.
They talked, as if alone, about queers.
The novelist said, “I don’t trust them.”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Sonia said. “Let me tell you about queers.” She laughed.
I laughed. I said, “Stop it.”
Sonia said to me, “You listen to us. There are a few things you should know.”
I said, “Why don’t we talk about Jews?”
The other guests came: a male novelist, his lady friend, a television producer, an Irish tenor.
I said, “Thank God you’ve come.”
“Why?” the male novelist asked.
“They were ganging up to talk about nothing but queers.”
We all laughed, hard, dry laughter.
I gave everyone drinks.
To get off the subject of queers, I congratulated the male writer on a book he had recently published.
Sonia said, “I won’t read it. I’m sure it’s awful.”
We all laughed.
More hysterical than anyone, I was incoherent, kept knocking over glasses, and tripping as I served food. In my small room, we were crowded together about the gas fire, on chairs and my bed, eating from our laps.
And all the while Sonia talked, talked more rapidly than I have heard anyone else talk, ever. The others were silent.
Sonia stopped for a moment, there was a pause, and I thought: I’ll just go and leave them all here to fate as there’s nothing I can do.
She said to the tenor, “Will you sing some Irish songs with something about liberty in them?”
I thought: I must go. If they don’t all go now, I must.
The tenor sang, his face raised and his eyes closed, medieval Irish songs, and after he finished the silence was terrible.
In a burst, Sonia gave a history of Ireland from 1169 or some such early date, which went on and on, all jumbled. She involved Israel in Irish history, and her pro-Irish sentiments gave way to pro-Israeli sentiments. She had flipped her lid. Nothing, I thought, could put it back on.
The only person she looked at, intently, was the woman novelist. Sonia kept jumping up to light her cigarettes.
When Sonia paused, I asked the male novelist if he would sing. He did. He sang “Jerusalem.”
I asked others to sing. The television producer did.
I sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Sonia refused to sing, as did the other women.
All the guests left at exactly ten o’clock.
While I cleared up the plates, glasses, overfilled ashtrays, I felt sick. I went to bed.
Two days later, I went to Sonia’s for dinner. I was worried that the evening she had spent with me would in ways I couldn’t imagine be continued. The female novelist was there.
Sonia put me on her right. She spoke calmly. That there was no hysteria about her almost disappointed me. Everyone else was calm too.
Over dessert, Sonia said to me, “I feel I was too rowdy at your flat the other evening. I’m very sorry about it. I was drunk.”
I said, “I thought you were spirited.”
“I was nervous,” she said. “I always lose control when I’m with people I don’t know.”
The evening was a bright family evening, and, again, I felt that Sonia gave me a place in that family; she made me feel that I belonged in London. For her, as for me, any family in London was a made-up family; she was entirely devoted to it.
I had a vision of Sonia giving or going out to, every day, luncheons, teas, drinks, dinners. But I saw that these required as great an effort when she went out to them as when she received; I think she often hated them.
I felt this: that what she really wanted was to lie on her bed in a darkened room.
More and more, she said, “Ridiculous! Ridiculous!”
That ridiculous became a state of the world. I could not imagine that there was some particular trouble in Sonia’s life which gave rise to such a general condemnation because Sonia would not allow me to imagine it. Whatever it might have been she kept it to herself, but there were outward signs of something kept in. She seemed to become physically uncoordinated, and sometimes, going into or out of a restaurant, tripped. Once, she fell in her house and hurt her jaw and lower lip so she had to have stitches. A tiny vein, like a fine, bright red worm, appeared just inside a nostril. She became prone to infections: a toe, a tooth. If I asked her how she was, she laughed and said, “Awful,” but that was all about herself. She’d quickly start talking about something else.
I realized that Sonia made me aware that everything I said and did, my very tone of voice and gestures, was vain. When I was with her her effect was to make me see my life as meaningless, as I knew she saw her own life. She did not impose this on me; it happened by my being in her presence. I could have decided not to be a friend of hers, but I was, I think, a close friend (she introduced me to others as a close friend); I wanted to be a close friend perhaps because I felt she saw the truth, and I respected her for seeing it. I would think: She’s right, everything is ridiculous.
Then she’d say to me, “Life being life, which is awful, of course we’ve got to be friends and help one another. Of course.”
She helped her friends in need as if she, herself, had no need of help.
When a friend died, she seemed not to grieve. I think she grieved privately, and the only evidence I had of that was when she stated in a direct way that she had been weeping all the night before. Her eyes looked swollen. But other than her stating this there was no way I could get her to talk about what she had wept for. I knew that if I did try to talk to her about her grief, she would, harshly, tell me I didn’t understand.
There were weeks when I didn’t see her; I had become used to seeing her weekly. If I rang her in the late morning, her voice sounded as if I’d just woken her. If I rang her in the late afternoon, she sounded as if she were about to go to bed.
When we did meet, she’d say, “I haven’t seen anyone in a long time. I couldn’t. I simply couldn’t.”
I wanted to help her, as she would have helped me; but when I said, “Please let me know if I can do anything,” she smiled, then frowned.
A friend did go to stay with Sonia to care for her. In the late morning, she’d bring a tray up to her, and would either find Sonia in a darkened room, her head lifted a little from the pillow, saying angrily, “You fucking well woke me just when I’d fallen asleep,” or, in a bright room, sitting up in bed, saying, as she stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray, “Enfin. I thought breakfast would never come.”
We wondered what was wrong with Sonia.
Then, unexpectedly, she sold her house, and a short time after she moved to Paris. There was something manic in the move, as if Paris were a solution to a problem which had no other solution. She told the newspapers that she was going to get a job reading and translating for a French publisher.
In Paris, she remained in close touch with her friends in London. We discussed her when we met. No one understood quite why she was living in Paris in what appeared to be self-imposed exile: she did not seem to have a job with a publisher; she did not seem to be seeing her French friends; she was in Paris for no apparent reason.