THE GIRL FROM THE FICTION DEPARTMENT
Even before one starts to read, Hilary Spurling's book looks inviting. There's its tidy size, the sepia-toned jacket photograph of the sexy Sonia Brownell leaning across a chair, the ivory-colored paper stock and the numerous snapshots interspersed throughout the text (rather than grouped in one photo section). At just under 200 pages, with airy margins, this "portrait" also feels seductive rather than daunting or magisterial (as were Spurling's enthralling but definitely imposing two-volume life of Ivy Compton-Burnett and her recent The Unknown Matisse). Here, in fact, is a book you want to take right to bed.
Sonia Brownell was born in India on August 18, 1918 and died, penniless in London, at the end of 1980. In the intervening years, her life was, as she once wrote, "real and hard and sad." But she also managed to love and be loved by some of the most interesting and creative people of the century.
In India, Sonia acted in a school play with her slightly older classmate Vivien Leigh. Later, the two both attended a Catholic girls school in Britain -- the very one excoriated in Antonia White's autobiographical classic, Frost in May. After Sonia graduated, she traveled around Eastern Europe in the 1930s with the young Serge Konovalov, future professor of Russian at Oxford, and Eugene Vinaver, soon to become the world's greatest authority on medieval French literature. Back in London, Sonia even helped transcribe the Winchester manuscript of Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur for Vinaver's great three-volume edition. Because her flat lay in an artists' neighborhood, the young blonde naturally drew the attention of the many painters working there and was soon being referred to as the Euston Street Venus. Lawrence Gowing "never forgot seeing Sonia at her window, combing her long fair hair behind the dusty glass and looking up tentatively at the painters as they passed." William Coldstream, much later Sir William Coldstream, pillar of the Royal Academy, fell in love with her. In later years, that notorious master of the grotesque, Francis Bacon, was her closest English friend.
Still in her early twenties, Sonia Brownell next gravitated into the circle of young women working for Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine. (Connolly, it was said by Anthony Powell, was the mirror image of Pentheus, "held together rather than torn apart by the Maenads.") Before long, Sonia was the de facto managing editor, doing the day-to-day magazine work for which Connolly and Stephen Spender were often credited (she discovered, for instance, Angus Wilson). Once, this clearly irresistible beauty spent a weekend in the country at the home of "Connolly's friend Dick Wyndham, a leathery, lustful satyr who pursued her round his garden until she dashed into the pond. 'It isn't his trying to rape me that I mind,' she gasped when the writer Peter Quennell fished her out, 'but that he doesn't seem to realize what Cyril stands for.' "
Through Horizon Sonia eventually encountered George Orwell, already suffering from the tuberculosis that would kill him. When he began work on 1984, she served as the model for Winston Smith's girlfriend Julia:
"The girl from the Fiction Department . . . was looking at him. . . . She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life. . . . She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated. . . . All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead."
But, as Orwell should have realized, Sonia's beauty and hard-drinking party-girl intensity masked a fundamental melancholy, one that struck nearly everyone she met.
After the war, Sonia traveled frequently to Paris, at first on Horizon business and later to visit the many friends she made in France. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "a man of immense charm and finesse," confessed that he was "transfixed from the first night they met by the sorrow underlying her surface gaiety." In some of the most delicious pages of this delicious book, Spurling evokes the heady, sensual-intellectual life of Paris during the late 1940s:
"Sartre, de Beauvoir and Camus followed [Merleau-Ponty] as regulars at the new, late-night bar that opened in the Tabou's cellar in the spring of 1947 with Juliette Greco behind the bar and Boris Vian on the trumpet. . . . It was here that Merleau-Ponty took Sonia when she returned to Paris, moving with her through the unhurried preliminary stages of an affair like graceful practised dance steps.'
In this already brilliant company Sonia soon met the critics Roland Barthes and Georges Bataille, the witty and encyclopedic Raymond Queneau, the great autobiographer Michel Leiris and the novelist Marguerite Duras, who became her best friend (and who later used her as the model for the witty, disconsolate Diana in Les Petits Chevaux de Tarquinie). Alas, the affair with Merleau-Ponty -- the great passion of her life -- came to an abrupt end, partly because he wouldn't leave his wife and she, tough-minded and absolutist, couldn't accept the role of mistress. One day Sonia was late for a rendezvous, and Merleau-Ponty simply left town without a word. She was utterly desolate. "Why did he love me? And why did he stop loving me?"
When she returned to London, George Orwell was dying. By this point, they were both broken down by life's miseries and turned desperately to each other. "She made no pretence of being in love with him and, at any rate to start with, acknowledged his need of her far more readily than hers of him. 'He said he would get better if I married him,' she told me twenty years later, 'so, you see, I had no choice.' " She nursed the frail moralist, brightened his days, planned to take him abroad where he would recover enough to carry on writing. Spurling asserts that this marriage of convenience ultimately metamorphosed into one of true love. And then, three days before the recuperative trip to Switzerland, Orwell died.
During the 1950s Sonia continued to excite controversy and attract admirers. She married an urbane, witty and homosexual aristocrat. She had brief affairs with, among others, an Israeli war hero and a noted French anthropologist. The Orwell estate only allowed her a modest allowance, yet at her small London house you might dine with Anthony Powell, Mary McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Rebecca West, Lucian Freud, Ivy Compton-Burnett. She was a natural hostess. And, as Spurling notes again and again, instinctively kind and generous beneath that sometimes fierce and moody exterior. For instance, she took charge of caring for the aged, difficult novelist Jean Rhys and never failed to bring gifts and chocolate to her 13 godchildren.
Yet she was hated in some circles, largely because of her devotion to Orwell. With Ian Angus she meticulously compiled and edited The Collected Letters, Essays and Journalism, but she also enforced Orwell's express desire that there be no biography. Working hard to protect his interests, Sonia failed to look after her own. Utterly ignorant of money matters, she lived on her small stipend and paltry handouts from George Orwell Productions, whose chief financial adviser appears to have been not only parsimonious but also power-mad and possibly a crook. Eventually, Sonia inaugurated legal action to wrest back control of the estate for Orwell's legitimate heir, his son Richard.
Thus her last years were particularly bleak -- she was tricked into giving up her London house, plagued by legal nightmares, distressed by the sudden deaths of old friends, despised by Orwell biographers, increasingly impoverished. By the time she fell ill from cancer, she was virtually broke; only reading, conversation and drink provided their usual momentary consolations. When Sonia died, just four years before 1984, at a time when her husband's books were earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, her savings wouldn't cover the costs of her funeral. Francis Bacon paid off his beloved friend's last debts.
"No memory of having starred," said Robert Frost, "Atones for later disregard/ Or keeps the end from being hard." Sonia Brownell Orwell was never the sort of woman people could disregard, but her end was certainly bleak enough. Still, she led quite a life, and Spurling, who knew her during its last decade, recounts it briskly, stylishly, with real affection and warmth. Like her contemporaries Mary McCarthy and Iris Murdoch, Sonia sped through the years as a free spirit, albeit one suffused with the deep sorrowfulness that those close to her never quite understood. Not herself creative, she was nonetheless a muse who inspired writers, painters and thinkers, an editor who helped the young and the old, the artistic and the scholarly, and a friend, comforter and confidante to a wide circle of now legendary figures. Anyone who reads this deft and lovely book will wish to have known her. *
Michael Dirda's email address is dirdam@washpost.com. His online discussion of books takes place each Thursday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.
