Keeper of the great man's flame

the girl from the fiction department: a portrait of sonia orwell by hilary spurling(hamish hamilton, (pounds) 9.99)

HAD Sonia Brownell not married George Orwell in the last few days of his life, would anyone have thought her worthy of a book? Though intelligent and articulate, she was not particularly talented. She was not a writer herself, though she hung around literary types. Her attraction to writers was obvious. She was strikingly good-looking, with long, wavy, fair hair, a cute face and bulbous lips. Also, and perhaps most importantly, she posed no threat to the denizens of Grub Street. Her presence in their ranks was more decorative than competitive.

Cyril Connolly's biographer said he was drawn to her because she "most closely approximated to the ideal of a literary vestal virgin." Connolly, who most closely approximated to an overfed toad, somehow managed to get her to bed. "What did she see in him?" asked Orwell's official biographer, Bernard Crick. His answer was "honesty, straightforwardness, sincerity" - rare qualities among the duplicitous literati. Crick then turned his question round. What did he see in her? "Probably youth, beauty, the life force, intelligence." Connolly asked Sonia to marry him, but she turned him down, because she did not love him.

That story alone would appear to refute the accusations of those who have denounced Sonia as a gold-digger, capitalising on the vulnerability of Orwell when he was dying. This seems a rather harsh verdict. True, she was not always sympathetic, at least if we are to believe the many accounts of the period, the majority of which were written by men. Some thought her pretentious, of which there are many greater crimes. Certainly, under the influence of drink she could be obnoxious and aggressive, even violent. In his recent memoir, John Calder, with whom Sonia organised a Writers' Festival in Edinburgh in the 1960s, recalled how she once smashed a bottle over his head in a restaurant. Knowing John personally, however, I can well understand how she felt driven to do that.

Dislike of her may also have stemmed from her promotion of her favourite writers, including JR Ackerley, Saul Bellow and Angus Wilson, which inevitably leads to jealousy, and her unwillingness to allow biographers who followed in Crick's wake unrestricted access to Orwell's papers. Rebuffed, they took their revenge. Michael Shelden in his 1991 biography of Orwell, portrayed Sonia as heartless, greedy and manipulative. It is, argues Hilary Spurling, a myth that has continued to persist.

Who knows where the truth lies? Biographies are never definitive, nor ever can be. They offer a view of a life but everyone sees things from a different perspective. In any case, the world would be a sorry place if life was without friction. Crick seems to be one of those whom Sonia came to resent but his depiction of her in his biography of Orwell is even-handed and his appreciation of her assistance generously acknowledged. Her admirers, who may well have outnumbered her detractors, were as diverse as Mary McCarthy and Stephen Spender and Anthony Powell, who wrote warmly of the effect her marriage had on Orwell's morale.

One wonders, then, if Spurling has been moved to defend her friend's reputation out of a false sense of injustice. If so, it is nevertheless a welcome reversal of the trend among many modern biographers, who'd rather accentuate the worst sides of their victims. Instead Spurling seeks out Sonia before she married Orwell and was obliged to take on the onerous task of keeping his flame alive.

Her story is that of girl born in Colonial India in 1918 to genteelly impoverished parents. After returning to London, Sonia was educated unhappily by nuns. A defining moment in her life came in the mid- 1930s when she went sailing with three young friends in Switzerland. The boat capsized and Sonia was haunted ever after by the image of her fighting off one of the drowning boys who threatened to drag her under.

She was married for the first time to a painter when she was 20. She modelled, fully-clothed (she was known as the Euston Road Venus), and hung out in Bloomsbury and in bohemian Paris. Her entree to the literary world came via the magazine Horizon, edited by Connolly, who despite his looks gathered round him a harem of helpers, of whom Sonia, a speed typist, was, according to Spurling, "intellectually the toughest, and probably the most disinterested."

She first met Orwell, the indigent author of several slow-selling books, including Down And Out In Paris And London and The Road To Wigan Pier, at a Horizon dinner in 1940 or 1941. When next they met, after the war, he had written Animal Farm, and was a widower with TB and an adopted infant son. He was desperately lonely and asked Sonia to marry him - as he had several other women. At first she refused and he went off to Jura to write 1984, portaying Sonia as Julia, "the girl from the Fiction Department." They were eventually married in hospital in October, 1949. Orwell was 46 years old and Sonia was 31. A little over three months later he was dead and she became a single mother and his literary executor.

In hindsight, it looks as if she'd made a smart career move. The truth is that few then regarded Orwell as a great writer. But Sonia did and she remained faithful to his legacy, spurning potential biographers by appointing Malcolm Muggeridge because he promised never to advance the project. Eventually, being Orwell's widow unhinged her. Her drinking accelerated and her accountant took her to the cleaners. She became reclusive and turned from friends to books, which never let her down. She died penniless in 1981.

With Sonia safely out of the way, Crick wrote a critical article in the Times Educational Supplement, the opening shot in a campaign of vilification. Spurling, in attempting loyally to defend her, has offered a timely and elegant defence in a cause celbre in which the verdict must surely be not proven.

Copyright 2002
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