Semi-Carnally?
Martha Bridegam
was previously Cyril Connolly's trusted assistant for several years?
/MAB
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Deepti901
>was previously Cyril Connolly's trusted assistant for several years?
Perhaps she was just a real babe. Supposedly most of the noticeably young women
that G. O. proposed to in his incipient dotage were of the 'comely' sort, but
I've never seen a picture of Sonia. If he didn't have that vile little mustache
he must have been a rather attractive man to meet.
Rebecca and Rowland
> >Does anyone else find it interesting that George Orwell's second wife
> >was previously Cyril Connolly's trusted assistant for several years?
>
> Perhaps she was just a real babe. Supposedly most of the noticeably young
> women that G. O. proposed to in his incipient dotage were of the 'comely'
> sort, but I've never seen a picture of Sonia. If he didn't have that vile
> little mustache
I think they were fashionable in a working class sort of way in his time
- one of my granddads (the more obviously working class one) had one
just like it.
[snip]
Rowland.
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Deepti901
>> little mustache
>
>I think they were fashionable in a working class sort of way in his time
>- one of my granddads (the more obviously working class one) had one
>just like it.
No offense meant, of course.
Alan Allport
>>Does anyone else find it interesting that George Orwell's second wife
>>was previously Cyril Connolly's trusted assistant for several years?
>
>Perhaps she was just a real babe. Supposedly most of the noticeably young
women
>that G. O. proposed to in his incipient dotage were of the 'comely' sort,
but
>I've never seen a picture of Sonia. If he didn't have that vile little
mustache
>he must have been a rather attractive man to meet.
Sonia was renowned for her beauty, nicknamed by colleagues 'The Venus of
Euston Road' (sic?). In the most commonly reproduced period photograph of
her, taken in 1949 in the 'Horizon' office on her last day at work, she's
truly lovely. I presume an interest in beautiful girls, like sixpenny
Woolworth's roses and poetry, is bourgeois and hence to be condemned as
insufficiently Comradely; but let's not forget that Sonia didn't do too
badly out of the marriage. She acquired appreciable royalties and a surname
that was already becoming internationally famous - it's interesting that
Eileen was always Mrs. Eric Blair, but Sonia was most definitely an Orwell
(despite the fact that the name was legally meaningless, GO never having
formally switched to it. That brings on another thought; I wonder if he ever
had to deal with any practical difficulties in possessing a dual identity?
Anthony Burgess said that he had spent countless hours in airport security
offices trying to convince immigration officials that the John Wilson
mentioned on his passport was one and the same person).
Alan.
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*********************************************
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~allport/
*********************************************
Tom Deveson
<all...@ee.upenn.edu> writes
>Sonia was renowned for her beauty, nicknamed by colleagues 'The Venus of
>Euston Road' (sic?). In the most commonly reproduced period photograph of
>her, taken in 1949 in the 'Horizon' office on her last day at work, she's
>truly lovely. I presume an interest in beautiful girls, like sixpenny
>Woolworth's roses and poetry, is bourgeois and hence to be condemned as
>insufficiently Comradely; but let's not forget that Sonia didn't do too
>badly out of the marriage. She acquired appreciable royalties and a surname
>that was already becoming internationally famous - it's interesting that
>Eileen was always Mrs. Eric Blair, but Sonia was most definitely an Orwell
>(despite the fact that the name was legally meaningless, GO never having
>formally switched to it.
The following may be what everybody already knows, but here goes.
There are two (at least) not very generous accounts of Sonia Orwell in
later years in writers' memoirs.
One is in David Plante's *Difficult Women* (1983), where she is the
central one of the three allegedly identified in the title, the other
two being Jean Rhys and Germaine Greer.
Plante describes his first meeting with her at an exhibition of
paintings, where she spoke repetitively and furiously and quoted
"George" (whom Plante couldn't identify, not having yet been introduced
to her) as an authority for her dogmatic generalisations on England,
France and America.
He makes her out as a paradoxical, though perhaps not entirely unusual,
mixture of sociability and loneliness and of selflessness and cruelty.
"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 helped her friends in
need as if she, herself, had no need of help...Sonia was difficult, but
she was difficult for a reason. She wanted, demanded so much from
herself and from others, and it made her rage that she and others
couldn't ever match what was done to what was aspired to... "
He also describes her heavy drinking and last illness. "She was very
thin. In her gaunt, distorted face, the skin around the sockets of her
eyes sunk in, her teeth were large and yellow. Shocked, I leaned towards
her and kissed her and I sobbed. When I drew back she was smiling; her
entire face appeared to be a smile. She suddenly looked very beautiful."
Kingsley Amis in his *Memoirs* 1991 talks of an occasion in the early
1960's when he and Malcolm Muggeridge went back to Sonia Orwell's flat
after a fairly drunk dinner together. Both Muggeridge and Amis took
turns in bed with her but neither could "manage anything" and after
getting his trousers back on, Amis offered a "wretched apology and some
sort of valediction" and went away with Muggeridge to sleep it all off.
Amis' memory might have been impaired as he describes Sonia Orwell as
"smallish and brownish" but then adds that he may be confused by the
fact that "she was also somehow called Sonia Brownell." He puts in a
footnote to say "one who knew her better than I assures me that she was
actually large, fair and, he added, cultured. He also added, without
striking any chord with me, that she had been known to some as
'Buttocks' Brownell."
In Michael Shelden's biography of GO, Sonia is said to have had "light
brown hair" when she was William Coldstream's lover in 1939, but Lys
Lubbock, Cyril Connolly's companion during the '40's says, "she had a
pink-and-white complexion and golden blonde hair...In the sunshine it
glowed and was the crown to her beauty. I think it was this radiance of
health that so attracted Orwell, who perhaps saw her as a kind of life
force to compensate for his own poor health."
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
>
<another great article on another non-obvious Orwell topic that he
manages to know quite a lot about, this time re: Sonia. Thx again.>
What I meant in earlier post was, wonder if her close association with
Connolly was part of her attraction to GO?
Also, it's interesting that although Sonia is sometimes discussed as a
possible model for the Julia character in "1984" it appears from the
leters that they really didn't get close until after "1984" was
published. Is that right?
Here's the Sonia bit from Davison's "It now remains to tell..."
appendix. It's written by Ian Angus, not Davison, hence the first-person
reference to an editorial project is re: CEJL.
(Apologies for rendering the French with no accents. Don't know how to
make Netscape do them.)
"After Orwell's death Sonia Orwell divided her time between England and
France, a country she loved and where she had many friends. Several
years after her death she was recalled by one of them, the writer Michel
Leiris: "Douee en verite d'une sensibilite aigue et d'un esprit prompt a
l'enthousiasme, cette Anglaise nee dans les lointaines Indes et qui ne
portait nulle trace de l'education bigote que toute jeune elle avait
recue etait -- n'en deplaise a ses detracteurs -- la generosite meme et,
cherchant sans doute a desarmer le tourment profond dont la presence se
laissait deviner sans grand risque d'erreur derriere sa gaite
habituelle, semblait prendre le plus grand de ses plaisirs a reunir chez
elle ceux et celles dont la compagnie lui agreait.'
In 1950 Sonia for a short time worked for the publishing firm, Skira, in
Geneva; then from 1951 she worked as a consultant and reader for
Weidenfeld & Nicolson and also worked for them as an editor from 1954 to
1956. She persuaded them to publish Nigel Dennis, Saul Bellow, Elisabeth
Hardwick, Dan Jacobson, and Mary McCarthy. In 1958 she married Michael
Pitt-Rivers but the marriage lasted barely four years and ended in
divorce in 1965.
Her love of literature was intense but she set a low value on her own
literary ability and as a consequence the output of her writing was
meagre: a few reviews in "Horizon," the "London Magazine" (1959-60), and
in "Europa Magazine" (1971); some reports from abroad in the Sunday
Times (1n 1956 from Israel) and the "Twentieth Century" (from Paris in
1960); and her disagreement in "Nova" in 1969 with Mary McCarthy's
assessment of Orwell. In 1964-65 she was a co-editor of the Paris-based
international review "Art and Literature". She translated many articles
from French and in 1966 translated "Days in the Trees," by her friend
Marguerite Duras, for the Royal Shakespeare Company. To writers whom she
befriended she was generous in encouragement and frequently helped them
materially, realising that, in some cases, critical acclaim did not
necessarily sell enough books to support them in their writing.
Shortly after Orwell died, Sonia arranged that the Library of the
British Museum should receive his pamphlet collection, where, as he had
wished, it is now preserved. Ten years later, in 1960, she made possible
the creation of the George Orwell Archive by donating to it all Orwell's
papers in her possession. She was a founder trustee of the Archive, with
Sir Richard Rees (her co-literary executor), the Honourable David Astor,
John Beavan (Lord Ardwick), and the Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern
English Literature, James R. Sutherland. The policy of the trustees has
been to acquire material by and on Orwell and to develop the Archive as
a centre for Orwell studies.
Early in the 1960s, William Jovanovich, the hed of Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Orwell's publishers at that time in New York, was eager to
put more of Orwell's writings into print. This resulted, under his
stimulus and encouragement, in the five-year collaboration of Sonia and
myself (I was then in charge of the Orwell Archive) in editing the
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, which was
published in four volumes in 1968.
Passionate and impulsive as she was in her personal relations -- indeed,
in everything she did -- she was nevertheless steadfast and scrupulous
in carrying out her rseponsibilities as Orwell's literary executor. She
sought to make her decisions on exclusively literary ground and to be of
the kind that she thought Orwell would have approved. She vigorously
resisted any attempt to sentimentalise or distort his work or
commercialise it.
In requesting in his will that he shold not be the subject fo a
biography, Orwell unwittingly placed on Sonia a heavy burden which
became a highly emotive matter for her and caused her constant anguish
till the end of her life. For the first few years after his death she
faithfully committed herself to observe his wish and thus unavoidably
disappointed and upset aspiring biographers and publishers, the more so
if they had been Orwell's friends or acquaintances. Then, when the
growth of Orwell's fame made it seem certain that a life would in any
case be published, she agonised over whom to authorise. She was unable
to secure Richard Ellmann, and in 1955 Malcolm Muggeridge accepted her
invitation to write a biography of Orwell, but he failed to produce one.
Throughout 1980, when she was dying fo cancer, Sonia was distressed and
self-reproachful for having commissioned, eight years earlier, a
biography by Bernard Crick; she found she disliked it but contractual
arrangements ensured that she could not stop its publication. The book
appeared in late November that year and was very well received by
critics. She was also sorely tormented in her last year by an impending
lawsuit over Orwell's literary estate which finally and reluctantly she
was forced by her physical condition to settle out of court, also late
in November. She died on 11 December 1980, aged sixty-two."
The above per Davison's Vol. XX, Appendix 13.
Rebecca and Rowland
> >If he didn't have that vile
> >> little mustache
> >
> >I think they were fashionable in a working class sort of way in his time
> >- one of my granddads (the more obviously working class one) had one
> >just like it.
>
> No offense meant, of course.
Eh? How could I take offence?
Alan Allport
<36D76F...@sirius.com>...
> "Douee en verite d'une sensibilite aigue et d'un esprit prompt a
> l'enthousiasme, cette Anglaise nee dans les lointaines Indes et qui ne
> portait nulle trace de l'education bigote que toute jeune elle avait
> recue etait -- n'en deplaise a ses detracteurs -- la generosite meme et,
> cherchant sans doute a desarmer le tourment profond dont la presence se
> laissait deviner sans grand risque d'erreur derriere sa gaite
> habituelle, semblait prendre le plus grand de ses plaisirs a reunir chez
> elle ceux et celles dont la compagnie lui agreait.'
Well, someone's going to have to own up so I suppose it will be moi.
How about a translation for those of us whose French irregular verbs are
even more irregular than usual?
Alan.
Tom Deveson
writes
>What I meant in earlier post was, wonder if her close association with
>Connolly was part of her attraction to GO?
>
>Also, it's interesting that although Sonia is sometimes discussed as a
>possible model for the Julia character in "1984" it appears from the
>leters that they really didn't get close until after "1984" was
>published. Is that right?
Now here's a strange thing. Yesterday I was tempted into a public
library book-sale just along the road from Tooley Street in Southwark.
It was not the Bermondsey library where GO wrote most of "Hop-Picking"
which is a short bike-ride away. This one is actually called the John
Harvard Library after JH whose father was a local butcher and inn-keeper
and who went to America in 1637 and founded a college in Massachusetts.
Tooley St is where GO and Ginger went to the sevenpence-a-night kip
after hop-picking in 1931. I'm glad to report the library was free from
bugs. I bought for 30 pence a copy of *Friends of Promise: Cyril
Connolly and the World of Horizon* by Michael Shelden (1989) and have
just skimmed the Sonia-pages.
Apologies again if all the following is known already.
Sonia (who was described by Stephen Spender in his Journal as having a
"Renoir face") met Cyril Connolly as a result of trying to publish a
piece in Horizon about British artists of the Euston Road school. She
was 21 at the time. Spender introduced Sonia to Connolly who was charmed
by her and did his best to establish a love affair with her. There was
strong attraction but no affair. Connolly wrote much later "I always
regard Sonia as my unconscious enemy --unconscious because unaware of
the strength of her Lesbian drives...She has done me more harm than
good, she is the enemy of the male principle, one has to be broken down
to win her pity.."
Sonia for her part became a fervent advocate of Connolly's work,
believing in his literary genius. She was a very fast typist and did
much to help Horizon, though her actual job was as a clerk in the
Ministry of War Transport. People assumed that she was employed by the
magazine because she did so much work for it as a volunteer. She only
joined the staff after the war.
One time, after being chased by a drunk friend of Connolly's, she jumped
into a pond to get away from him. According to Spender's journals, she
came out the pond muddy and dripping and shaking and said, "It isn't his
trying to rape me that I mind, but that he doesn't seem to realise what
Cyril stands for."
There's a lot about her early life, strict convent education, rebellion
against all that, and her close involvement with Peter Watson, a gay Old
Etonian whose father left two million pounds when he died and who grew
up in a seventeen-bedroom house. Watson, who co-founded and funded
Horizon, used to give Sonia money for holidays and meals. Connolly used
to complain that Sonia only gave him 30% of her smile, the other 70%
being reserved for Watson. Watson himself believed that Sonia wanted to
become Mrs Connolly and was surprised by her becoming Mrs Orwell
instead.
There's an interesting passage describing her rejection of a poem by
Theodore Roethke in July 1946. In her rejection letter she uses the
phrase "very American" to mean uninspiring and undistinguished as
poetry!
GO and Sonia met at a dinner party "during the war" given by Connolly in
Bedford Square. Sonia had just read *Burmese Days* and enjoyed it. She
said much later her first impressions of GO had been " off-putting. He
said that one should never write anything the working-classes don't
understand. He then said one shouldn't use adjectives and Cecil Day
Lewis [also present] said 'What about Shakespeare?'" When dinner was
served "He was very quiet and said something about you've put foreign
stuff in the food but sat down and enjoyed it." [Notes made by Ian Angus
from conversations in 1963/1967] When Eileen died in March 1945 Sonia
was sympathetic and helpful, doing some babysitting ("Oh the smell of
cabbage and unwashed nappies" she said to Ian Angus) and GO asked her to
marry him both then and when he was on Jura.
There's also stuff about her liking for Bogart films, her occasional
taking charge of the Horizon office, her affair with Merleau-Ponty, etc.
There's the moment when GO tells Fred Warburg that marrying Sonia might
help him get through ihs illness. "Apart from other considerations, I
really think I should stay alive longer if I were married." By then the
baby son was being looked after by GO's sister. After quarreling with
Merleau-Ponty, Sonia came back to London and said yes.
Waldemar Hansen, an aspiring poet from Buffalo, NY, who was Peter
Watson's lover wrote in a letter, "I almost forgot, Sonia is going to
marry George Orwell next week....Nobody seems to really approve, since
they all feel she is doing it as a Florence Nightingale gesture. There
is some truth in that, but the real truth is that she doesn't love M.P.
any more."
Incidentally, the book reproduces the picture of Sonia in the Horizon
office in 1948. What I didn't know before is that the usual version is
cropped. Lys Lubbock is sitting a few feet away, with a big black old-
fashioned telephone betweeen them.
This doesn't really answer any questions, but I thought the
Bermondsey/2ndhand books coincidence was worth commemorating.
--
Tom Deveson
Alan Allport
<+zRqlCA$+912...@devesons.demon.co.uk>...
<snip excellent Sonia stuff>
A quick mention of Anthony Burgess' recollection of Sonia... she was a
friend of Lynne Jones, AB's wife. He has just returned to London from
several angry, wasted war years as an Army Education Corps Sergeant in
Gibraltar:
"I stayed in the flat, ostensibly to read _Animal Farm_, actually to
disencrust the milk bottles under the cold water tap. She went out early...
to have lunch with Sonia Brownwell. We could not foresee any connection
between that lovely blonde girl, later to be ravaged through drink, and my
reading of _Animal Farm_. _Animal Farm_ and the milk bottles had their own
connection - the hopelessness of trying to cleanse sordor, the fatuity of
utopias. The British utopia was, without bricks let alone straw, in the
making..."
Alan.
Tom Deveson
<all...@snip.net> writes
>> "Douee en verite d'une sensibilite aigue et d'un esprit prompt a
>> l'enthousiasme, cette Anglaise nee dans les lointaines Indes et qui ne
>> portait nulle trace de l'education bigote que toute jeune elle avait
>> recue etait -- n'en deplaise a ses detracteurs -- la generosite meme et,
>> cherchant sans doute a desarmer le tourment profond dont la presence se
>> laissait deviner sans grand risque d'erreur derriere sa gaite
>> habituelle, semblait prendre le plus grand de ses plaisirs a reunir chez
>> elle ceux et celles dont la compagnie lui agreait.'
>
>
>How about a translation for those of us whose French irregular verbs are
>even more irregular than usual?
Something along the lines of:
Gifted with a truly acute sensibility and with a mind that tended
swiftly towards enthusiasm, this Englishwoman, born far away in India,
who bore no trace of the bigoted education that she received as a girl,
was -- however much it may displease her detractors -- generosity itself
and, no doubt seeking to disarm the deep affliction which could be
discerned without much risk of misunderstanding behind her
characteristic gaiety, appeared to take the greatest of pleasure in
bringing together at her house those men and women whose company she
found agreeable.
I'm not sure about "n'en deplaise a.." and haven't got a French
dictionary here at home, and the libraries are shut as it's Saturday
tea-time.
But that's roughly it, though inelegantly rendered. The French sentence
_is_ a bit of a mouthful.
Tom
--
Tom Deveson
Martha Bridegam
Davison, aren't you?
Martha Bridegam
>
> I'm not sure about "n'en deplaise a.." and haven't got a French
> dictionary here at home, and the libraries are shut as it's Saturday
> tea-time.
The footnote translation gives "n'en deplaise a ses detracteurs" as
"whatever her detractors may say."
Sorry, i should have posted the footnote in the first place. Apologies.
Martha Bridegam
>
> In article <36D84B...@sirius.com>, Martha Bridegam <jo...@sirius.com>
> writes
> >All right, Mr. "Deveson," your cover's blown. You're really Peter
> >Davison, aren't you?
>
> professorship, no long-distance running, no sextuple heart bypass --
> just a music teacher in London. But who knows what the future holds?
So of all the subjects to know a great deal about, why Orwell?
Tom Deveson
writes
>All right, Mr. "Deveson," your cover's blown. You're really Peter
>Davison, aren't you?
No Orwell-omniscience, no Herculean editorial labours, no university
professorship, no long-distance running, no sextuple heart bypass --
just a music teacher in London. But who knows what the future holds?
--
Tom Deveson
Tom Deveson
writes
>So of all the subjects to know a great deal about, why Orwell?
Short of a lengthy autobiography I guess the following made a
difference:
i) Being around as a just-teenager when Penguin Books produced the
relatively cheap (three shillings or three-and-sixpence -- I've still
got them) editions of Homage to Catalonia, Road To Wigan Pier, Keep the
Aspidistra Flying, Coming Up for Air, Down and Out, and slightly later,
A Clergyman's Daughter around 1962/1963. They looked fairly irresistible
in orange paperback with dark slightly haunting cover pictures, weren't
too expensive and were an attractive next point to visit after doing
Animal Farm in school.
ii) Reading *Such Such Were The Joys* in an American paperback sent by
US relatives around the same time. It wasn't obtainable in England
because some of the people were still alive and libellously
identifiable. The essay seemed so vivid to someone in a school that
still bore distant traces of the education system GO described, though
we had no Russian princes, we didn't pay fees, I went home after
lessons, etc. It was a matter of someone describing a world in a way
you felt to be essentially truthful however exaggerated in some
distasteful details.
iii) Getting to like the tone of voice that (as countless other readers
have surely noticed) is like that described at the end of the Dickens
essay -- " a face somewhere behind the page...not necessarily the face
of the writer...a man who fights in the open and is not frightened.." I
used to read that passage again and again and I was sure it fitted the
author as well as the subject. Pieces like *How The Poor Die* and
*Boys'Weeklies* in their entirely different ways had a similar effect.
iv) Finding some of the few biographies/studies available at the time in
my local library -- Christopher Hollis, Richard Rees, a little later
George Woodcock (1966 I think) -- and being slightly inveigled into
romantic and entirely impractical self-identification. "The Italian
soldier shook my hand" describes an experience many young people might
wish to have had without the pain of having it.
v) All these were before the age of 18 -- then came a few random
incidents such as:
a) Discovering that a very ancient and frail old teacher at my college
had been GO's classical tutor at Eton fifty years earlier. It was ASF
Gow (born 1886) -- he used to be seen occasionally about the place. (He
had also been a friend of AE Housman)
b) Coming to work as a teacher in South London in the areas partly
described in Down and Out and related pieces on tramping, hop-picking,
poverty etc. There is a lot of continuity in some parts of Bermondsey,
for example, and some families have been in the same streets since long
before the war. Back in the 1970's you caught more than occasional
feelings of a pre-war world that made the books re-kindle.
c) Discovering an original copy of Road To Wigan Pier in the Left Book
Club edition complete with photographs and dissenting Foreword by Victor
Gollancz for sale in a street market for a few pence -- that was a good
reason to read it again.
These made little links with GO, made him something more of an animated
presence than stiff black-and-white photographs.
I'll stop there. The books are still good and it's a further pleasure to
try to understand what you admire.
--
Tom Deveson