by D. J. Taylor
Naturally, such an engagement was highly newsworthy. Nineteen Eighty-Four, now three months on the bookshelves and avidly reviewed, had been an enormous success both in Britain and the United States. Several newspapers interested themselves in the romance between the bestselling author, now confined to a hospital bed, and the blonde young woman who ministered to him. ‘A specialist’s verdict will decide whether fair-haired Miss Sonia Brownell, engaged to novelist George Orwell, will have a bedside wedding in hospital’, the Star informed its readers on 17 September 1949. A reporter had called at the Horizon office in Bedford Square, where ‘Miss Brownell, in a white lace-work blouse and grey flannel skirt, was wearing her Italian engagement ring of ornamental design with rubies, diamonds and an emerald. She chose it herself because she thought it pretty.’ On the same day Orwell wrote to tell his friend Richard Rees that he had felt ‘distinctly better’ since coming to UCH. ‘Sonia comes & sees me for an hour every day & otherwise I am allowed one visitor for 20 minutes.’
The question of why Sonia – aged thirty-one and in the pink of health – consented to marry Orwell – forty-six and, it was generally agreed, on his deathbed – has been chewed over by biographers for seventy years. Something of the consternation it produced may be seen in the reaction of his friends, who if they did not actively disapprove, as Orwell had feared, were, almost to a man, nonplussed. Inevitably, the root of this mystification lay in the fact that many of them barely knew who she was. Malcolm Muggeridge’s diary for 5 September records that Anthony Powell is intrigued by ‘the curious information I had received that George Orwell is going to marry a girl called Sonia Brownell who is connected with bringing out the magazine Horizon’. That very few people were, at this stage, prepared to take Sonia at all seriously is confirmed by Muggeridge’s gloss: ‘she is what Tony calls an “Art Tart”. . . it will probably be a rather macabre wedding, I should suppose’. To the majority of Orwell’s male acquaintance, Sonia was merely a face at a Horizon desk, a girl glimpsed momentarily at a party, ripe for patronage and belittlement. Powell, who went on to become one of Sonia’s greatest friends, later recalled that he had ‘only met her once before she got engaged to George, an occasion when, owing to the bad light, I thought she was about 18 and gave her a terrific lecture on Classicism and Romanticism. She was a bit taken aback, having no mean opinion of her own qualifications in such spheres. My host, white and shaking, followed me out into the street and explained what I had done.’
Other observers were prepared to go further even than this. Woodrow Wyatt, who liked Sonia while ridiculing what he imagined to be her pretentious, highbrow side, was frankly incredulous: ‘Somehow she snuggled up to George Orwell . . . before he died and got him to marry her. Why he did so is a mystery . . . I hope the poor man did not die to a barrage of French phrases.’ In Wyatt’s defence, Sonia’s own friends were equally bewildered. ‘And Sonia’s engagement?’ Peter Watson ruminated in a letter to Waldemar Hansen. ‘It is all rather a shock to me. This week’s Time reports it in the People section under the heading “That old Feeling.” Mmm – I’m not so sure.’ Hansen’s own view was expressed in a letter to John Myers: ‘Nobody seems to 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, and since any choice she makes would not really matter . . . her marrying Orwell is okay. I, at least, approve.’
Female friends professed themselves startled by news of the engagement. There had been no hint of impending marriage. Neither was there any sign of sexual attraction. According to Janetta, Sonia confided to her they had slept together only once, at the Cranham sanatorium, and that the experience had been ‘disastrous’. There was a cultural drawback, too, in that Sonia preferred French writers. Although she admired Orwell’s work it was a pity, as Janetta put it, ‘that he was so English’. Looking back at the affair from the vantage point of old age, Janetta diagnosed a coming together of several quite different emotions: affection, interest, concern for his wellbeing and ‘guilt that she hadn’t deeper feelings of love’.
Establishing Sonia’s precise state of mind in the summer of 1949 is far from straightforward. Of the various motives that biographers have ascribed to her decision to marry Orwell, who can tell which carried the most weight? Certainly, she was on the rebound from Merleau-Ponty, anxious to exorcise the demons of the last two years and start afresh. On the other hand, part of her reasoning may have been narrowly expedient. With Connolly and Watson now increasingly detached from each other, it was clear by this time that her job at Bedford Square was unlikely to last into the New Year. Friends remembered her saying that, when Horizon folded, she would marry George. Connolly himself, who regarded the marriage as a ‘grotesque farce’, told Evelyn Waugh that he thought it ‘a panicky acceptance of a new job because she is losing the old one’. As for the skeletal figure whom she visited each day at UCH, there have been several attempts to characterise her as a gold-digger with one eye on her husband’s posthumous royalties. But the Orwell who asked her to marry him in the summer of 1949 was, at this stage, merely a moderately successful writer whose latest work had clearly scored a hit: no one could have envisaged Nineteen Eighty-Four’s continuing success throughout the decades that followed or the income it was likely to generate. Much more plausible is that incorrigible sense of duty and responsibility – ‘I felt sorry for him’, she once remarked in later life – coupled with the instinctive desire that her friends had noted as long ago as the 1930s to sit at a great man’s feet and organise his life to their mutual satisfaction. More than one onlooker noticed how at home she seemed at UCH, vigilant at her post by Orwell’s bedside, alert to his needs, dealing with his post and hobnobbing with his visitors. ‘She loved it,’ Janetta remembered, ‘and it was all to do with being in control.’
A shrewd investment or an act of self-sacrifice? Most onlookers were divided. Sinclair-Loutit, for example, thought it a ‘gross mismatch’ but also ‘the kindest and most generous act of Sonia’s life’. Only Koestler, whom Sonia disliked, was unequivocally in favour. ‘I have been saying for years that she is the nicest, most intelligent and decent girl that I met during my whole stay in England’, he declared. The significance of Koestler’s vote of confidence lay in its barbed assessment of the milieu she inhabited. She was ‘very lonely in that crowd in which she moves,’ he suggested to Orwell, ‘and she will become a changed person when you take her out of it. I think I had a closer view of the Connolly set-up than you did; it had a fairly stultifying effect which left its mark even on a tough guy like me.’ To Koestler, it was not that Sonia might be rescuing Orwell from a lonely widowerhood and giving him a reason to go on living, but that he was salvaging her from a life spent as Connolly’s handmaiden, permanently in thrall to his whims, forever dealing with the consequences of the administrative, and sometimes the emotional, problems he could not be bothered to solve himself.
It was all very well for friends to speculate. How did Sonia envisage her future? The optimistic view of Orwell’s condition, sometimes canvassed by sympathetic doctors on the UCH medical staff, was that he might improve sufficiently to be considered a ‘good chronic’. In this semi-convalescent state he could be allowed to retire to a cottage in the country where Sonia could nurse him, keep unwelcome visitors at bay and type his manuscripts. The less optimistic view, presumably unvoiced in Sonia’s presence, held that he was unlikely to survive. As the autumn wore on the friends who visited him grew increasingly pessimistic about his chances. Malcolm Muggeridge, who arrived at Room 65 in the last week of September, thought him ‘inconceivably wasted, and has, I should say, the appearance of someone who hasn’t long to live’. It was Muggeridge’s first encounter with Sonia – ‘a large, bouncy girl, quite pleasant’, he decided, who, if dressed in a tweed suit, would be the epitome of a philanthropic village lady, had she not chosen to ‘mess about’ with Horizon and ‘intellectual circles’. Shortly afterwards, he received a lette
r from her informing him that the wedding would take place on 13 October.
There could be no question of Orwell leaving his bed. A clergyman – the UCH chaplain, the Revd W. H. Braine – was summoned to preside; David Astor procured a special licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury. Muggeridge and Powell, commissioned to buy something suitable for the groom to wear, came up with a crimson corduroy jacket. Orwell approved of this dandy-ish gesture. Propped up against the pillows, he had, Powell thought, ‘an unaccustomed epicurean air’. And so, with half-a-dozen guests crammed into the tiny hospital room, the ceremony took place. Astor officiated as best man; Robert Kee gave away the bride; Janetta acted as witness. The night nurses had signed a congratulatory card. There was something unbearably poignant about the scene, those present recalled. Half a century later, Robert Kee retained a memory of Orwell ‘in bed but wholly participating and showing real attachment to Sonia’. Janetta lingered just inside the door, desperately upset, she remembered, and aghast at the austerity of the setting, yet for all her long-held suspicion of marriage and religious observance, deeply moved. The atmosphere was one of ‘bleakness and touching sadness’, she recalled, the bottle of champagne Sonia had brought with her sitting awkwardly amid the medical paraphernalia: ‘I think I had tears in my eyes watching that ill smiling face.’ Leaving the groom to reflect on his newly married state, the party then decamped to the Ritz for lunch.
The peculiar circumstances of Sonia’s marriage occurred to more than one literary diarist. Frances Partridge, who met the Kees later in the day, noted that they were ‘just back from a strange wedding party: Sonia Brownell had that afternoon married George Orwell in hospital where he lies seriously ill with T.B. He is said to have a fifty-fifty chance of recovery, and as he is much in love with her everyone hopes the marriage will give him a new interest.’ The Kees, Frances observed, ‘had obviously been much moved by the event.’ A few days later, armed with the comments of interested friends, she returned to her theme: ‘Many people regard the Orwell marriage cynically and remind one that Sonia always declared her intention of marrying a Great Man. I see it principally as a neurotic one, for a marriage to a bed-ridden and perhaps dying man is as near no marriage as it’s possible to get.’
This may have been true. Equally, there was no doubt that the marriage had improved Orwell’s spirits. Powell reckoned that for all his bed-bound and emaciated state in some respects ‘he was in better form than I had ever seen him show’. Muggeridge, who visited him in late October, found him ‘remarkably cheerful’. But he was growing steadily weaker – so thin now, he told a friend, ‘that it’s beyond the level at which you can go on living’. That Sonia seems to have grasped that the situation was beyond saving seems clear from a note sent by Lys to Connolly in the second week of November: ‘Poor George has had a relapse and Sonia now thinks the only thing is to send him to Switzerland.’ Meanwhile, sharp-eyed visitors noted the symptoms of nervous strain. Muggeridge, for example, was present one evening when Orwell’s supper was brought in on a tray. He had had a wonderful life, Sonia briskly informed him as the orderly set down the plates, waited on hand and foot, compared to her struggles with the temperamental Connolly.
Meanwhile, a stream of visitors continued to beat a path across the Bloomsbury squares: old comrades from the Spanish Civil War; Tribune colleagues; platoon-mates from the St John’s Wood Home Guard. Janetta brought Nicky to sit at his bedside: when her mother demurred at the noise the six year old made with her toy car, the gaunt figure in the bed solicitously intervened: ‘No, no, it’s all right. It’s all right. Let her be, let her do that,’ Nicky remembered him saying. But time was running short. On Christmas afternoon 1949 Powell and Muggeridge came to see him. He looked like a picture he had once seen of Nietzsche, Muggeridge thought, raging and furious at his deteriorating health, his mind roaming unappeasably back in time and forwards to the unknowable future. ‘Poor George. He went on about the Home Guard, and the Spanish Civil War, and how he would go to Switzerland soon, and all the while the stench of death was in the air, like autumn in a garden.’
The Swiss excursion – transfer by plane to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps – was little more than a palliative. No amount of alpine air could save him now. But still, preparations for his departure went on. Lucian Freud, mildly fixated on hospitals and medical procedures, was invited to join the party as a surrogate male nurse. A bundle of fishing rods lay in the corner of the room. Sonia’s friends continued to worry about her. ‘I hope you are NOT having a nervous breakdown and that you do get away for a change very soon,’ Peter Watson wrote early in January. ‘Also that George is better & able to leave by now for a better climate.’ And still the visitors came – five-year-old Richard, who had been brought down to London by Avril and taken to the zoo by the Powells; Orwell’s anarchist friend Vernon Richards, who recalled how his ‘thin, drawn face lighted up and his eyes shone’ as he described Richard’s account of the trip; Muggeridge, who, calling on Thursday 19 January 1950, thought him ‘at his last gasp’. The Swiss trip was now scheduled for 25 January. All that week, the visitors remembered, Sonia had been suffering from a cold and not always present at the bedside, but on 20 January, feeling better, she spent most of the day in Room 65. Then, early in the evening, she decided to go home. Sometime in the small hours an artery burst in Orwell’s lungs; he died within minutes.
Sonia seems to have kept very few of the letters she received in the following weeks, but she preserved Peter Watson’s note from Jamaica. ‘I have read the sad news in Time when I arrived here from Haiti. In these circumstances it is impossible to offer condolences & so extremely difficult to convey sympathy I know but I do want you to know how much I have been thinking about you the last days and how shocked I am.’ Watson would have been still more shocked to discover that something else had died in the room at University College Hospital. This, it is fair to say, was the old Sonia: the teenage girl that Coldstream and Pasmore had wanted to paint; the aspiring art critic proudly unveiling her plans to Connolly and Spender at the Café Royal; the keen-eyed custodian of the Horizon office. Her place would shortly be filled by a very different proposition: the Widow Orwell.
Interlude: Sonia’s Things
Like the man she married in the hospital bedroom in October 1949, Sonia left little behind her. Or rather, little in the way of physical artefacts. Not counting the books and the pamphlet collection, Orwell’s leavings could be fitted into a couple of cardboard boxes: the fishing rods the dying man had planned to take to Switzerland with him; a fragment or two of the Blair family silver; the tie Sonia had given him for Christmas four weeks before he died; assorted odds and ends from his bedbound, post-Hebridean life. Seventy years after his death, this notional pile has dwindled almost to nothing. Even the handful of artefacts featured in the last photographs of him ever taken seem to have vanished from the earth. I once asked Richard Blair what had happened to the antique Burmese sword his father can be seen unsheathing from its scabbard in Vernon Richards’s photograph taken at the Islington flat in 1946, and received the answer that it had been used for bringing in the Jura harvest in the 1950s and then disappeared, been left to rust at the field’s edge or thrown out with the rest of the superannuated ironmongery.
With Sonia, the trail seems even sparser. Her correspondence is mostly restricted to the letters she sent to William Coldstream in the early years of the war, her petition to Spender about the number on Young English Painters, and a fragment to Merleau-Ponty, written on Horizon paper, that may not even have been sent. Here and there, though, in the box files devoted to her in the Orwell Archive, something stirs. There is, for example, the celebratory card, signed ‘The Night Nurses’, offering ‘Congratulations on Your Wedding Day’, and a National Provincial Bank cheque, signed by Connolly jokily dated 22 January 1999, and promising to ‘Pay Sonia Brownell one million pounds & no more.’ Even better, perhaps, are the occasional hints of the role she played in managing Orwell’s affairs in the last six months of
his life. Working in the Archive one day, I turned up a small padded box that looked as if jewellery might once have been kept in it. From beneath its gingerly prised-up rim came fluttering two or three scraps of paper, each of them bearing Orwell’s signature.
What were they doing there? Why had Sonia hoarded them? To what use had she wanted them put? Most of the other items in the file dated from 1949, the year in which Orwell lay flat on his back at the Gloucestershire sanatorium or at University College Hospital supervising the publication of his last novel and then monitoring its reception. Unsurprisingly, given the state its author was in, very few signed copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four survive. It seems reasonable to suppose that the signatures were for volumes that Orwell aimed to present to his friends, that this was the residue left over when the ever-efficient Sonia had finished the job of sticking them in.