The publisher's puff is that Sonia was rubbished after her death by the literary establishment (in this country anyway) and Hilary sets out to set the record straight. Which she does to the extent of showing what a substantial and interesting person Sonia was, but not to the extent of accounting for the spending of the Orwell inheritance, which became large in the year's after George's death and the squandering of which is one of the main planks of the establishment's rubbishing.
Her early life was hard. She was born in Bengal in 1918 where her father died, possibly suicide, when she was a few months old {and I wonder in passing whether conscription reached out as far as English men of military age in India}. Her mother remarried, to a man who turned out to be a violent drunk who had to be divorced, this at a time when divorced women were made to suffer, whatever the story. But before that Sonia was shipped back, at the advanced age of 6, to a Catholic girls' boarding school at Roehampton, a school which scarred her for life and which was the subject of her approximate contemporary's 'Frost in May'. {One wonders about the fate of all those other children from the colonies who must have gone through much the same mill}. Her family could not afford to send her to university, so she was packed off to school in Switzerland, the scene of the next tragedy, the death of her landlady's daughter and two lads in a boating accident in a lake. She probably carried the memory of the desperate clutches of a drowning man to the end of her own life. But somehow she got through all of this to become loved by so many people for 'her gaiety, her generosity and her radiant vitality'; swinging London was up and running well before the swinging sixties. And like Osbert before her (see 25th May), she seems to have known everyone who was anyone in the arty worlds of London and, in her case, of Paris. To the point of having a sketch of her by Picasso included as the frontispiece of the present book; the sort of thing he probably knocked out on the back of the menu after someone had bought him a meal, but a Picasso none the less. She modeled (though not in the nude) for both her painter friends and her writer friends, appearing in a number of the books of these last, not least as Julia in 1984, perhaps her most well known appearance. She was also, it seems, one of the subjects of some rough trade from Arthur Koestler, rough trade which resulted in an abortion, presumably of the variety which was then more or less illegal.
Her closer friends included the likes of Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, Marguerite Duras and Wystan Auden. While not particularly creative herself and perhaps because she was herself denied a proper education, she worshipped at the altar of arty and intellectual types and was also a very efficient literary editor. But these friends mostly knew that under the surface things were not quite right; she drank a good deal and was given to savage, public outbursts at men friends. She was something of an angel of death, easing the passing of a number of important people, including Orwell himself and Auden. But she was very good at that too, with one result being that she was made Orwell's sole heir in his death bed will.
And then, after an interval, she married a rich man with an estate in Dorset, a man with a distinguished (second world) war record with the Welsh Guards and one the defendants in a large and lurid trial of homosexuals in 1954, a trial which at least served to push forward the campaign for change. But a marriage which failed and which, in Hilary's story, ultimately led to Sonia's death (from a brain tumour), more or less in penury.
It turns out that the same reading from Ecclesiastes was used both at Sonia's funeral and at George's, thirty years before. Being somewhat alert to this particular bit of the Bible (I am sure there are more mentions here and in the other place than those turned up by 'Ecclesiastes' as a search term), I look up the bit about the golden bowl (reproduced above), to find that while it is oddly chilling, it is more or less incomprehensible. I turn to the 'Good News Bible' where the same passage is comprehensible, but scarcely seems to be derived from the same text. Perhaps the 'Good News' translators, with access to modern scholarship and machinery, felt able to make a freer translation of the Ancient Hebrew than King James' committee. But at least I was amused to find that this particularly miserable bit of the Bible was immediately followed by the 'Song of Solomon' and I now know where the title of the Henry James story comes from.
I also know that Orwell died disappointed that he dissipated much of his life in journalism, rather than in heavier fare, and very concerned that the literary vultures should not pick over his corpse when he was gone, a sentiment with which I have much sympathy. He wanted his monument to be his proper books, not all the trivia and worse blowing around it. His (brand new) wife was given very clear instructions on this point, which included blocking biography and had originally included destruction of lesser works and ephemera, instructions which she tried to honour, attracting much opprobrium from the aforementioned literary establishment in the process. But despite the sympathy, I shall now read Conrad's widow's reminiscences about her husband, said to have been fuel for some of this. Perhaps Orwell was also mindful of Hardy's widow.
PS: I continued with Osbert in parallel, coming to the bit this morning where, in the context of the General Strike, he has dealings with the Marquess of Reading mentioned on 15th March.
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