Cockaigne
Frank Kermode
- Orwell: The Authorised Biography by Michael Shelden
Heinemann, 563 pp, £18.50, October 1991, ISBN 0 434 69517 3
There is already a lot of biographical writing about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to indicate disapproval of Crick, who, much to her annoyance, had lawyers good enough to ensure that he was able to publish it anyway, quotations and all.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
Letters
Vol. 13 No. 21 · 7 November 1991
From Francis Wyndham
In his finely judged review of Michael Shelden’s Orwell (LRB, 24 October), Frank Kermode writes that Orwell’s widow Sonia ‘is represented, perhaps not altogether fairly, as tiresomely selfish and irresponsible’. Shelden’s treatment of Sonia, although it may give a superficial impression of being even-handed, is in several ways very unfair indeed. Shelden insinuates that one of Sonia’s motives in accepting Orwell’s second proposal of marriage was mercenary greed. I knew her only slightly then, but got to know her very well soon after and am certain that this is laughably wide of the mark. Nobody was ever less of a gold-digger: indeed, I believe she was the most generous person I have ever known.
She loved to entertain her friends but allowed herself few luxuries. (Shelden, with a report in the Star newspaper as his only source, makes much of a lavish engagement ring bought by Sonia with the dying Orwell’s hard-earned money: this ring was, in fact, small and unassuming, almost like a ring in a cracker.) The money she later received from Orwell’s Estate (a much more modest fortune than is often assumed) was spent largely on helping people in whose talent she believed. One of these was a friend we shared: Jean Rhys. Sonia’s phenomenal kindness to her began before Jean became relatively well-known and lasted till Jean’s death. Sonia would take the greatest trouble to discover exactly what Jean really wanted (clothes, a holiday, cash, whatever) and would then show the finest delicacy and most sensitive imagination in seeing that she got it. On one occasion I found out by chance that Sonia had pretended to Jean that I was the donor of some especially munificent treat. So much for Sonia’s selfishness.
As for irresponsibility: Sonia took her duties as Orwell’s Literary Executor with extreme seriousness and fought bravely to carry out what she believed to be his wishes. Indeed, the complications involved in the management of such an Estate can be said to have clouded the rest of her life. A Literary Executor’s job is seldom an easy one, but it becomes nightmarishly difficult when a writer has left unambiguous instructions that there should be no biography and then achieves the enormous celebrity that came to Orwell after his death. She may have made some mistakes, and some people may have found her intransigence tiresome, but it was always prompted by loyalty to Orwell’s memory and in this important respect I believe that she triumphantly justified his faith in her.
Francis Wyndham
London W11
Vol. 13 No. 23 · 5 December 1991
From Michael Shelden
In his letter (7 November) Francis Wyndham accuses me of being unfair to Sonia Brownell in my biography of her first husband, George Orwell. He says that she was an exceedingly generous woman who gave little thought to Orwell’s ‘modest fortune’ when she married the dying novelist in October 1949. I leave the question of her generosity to others, but I think it is dishonest to pretend that money did not influence her action. She was in no position to ignore Orwell’s wealth. In the autumn of 1949 she was on the verge of losing her job at Horizon – it closed at the end of the year – and she had no money of her own in reserve.
It is absurd to claim that Orwell’s fortune was ‘modest’. During the last four years of his life, Animal Farm sold over 600,000 copies in Britain and America, and in early 1949 the Book of the Month Club paid a large sum for the rights to Nineteen Eighty-Four (his British publisher Frederic Warburg estimated the sale to be worth at least £40,000).
Wyndham calls Frank Kermode’s review of my book (LRB, 24 October) ‘finely judged’. I am afraid that I do not know what to call it. When Kermode begins rambling on about the Mafia, the Vatican and Sicilian peasants, I have trouble keeping up with his argument. I must say, however, that I am intrigued by his obsessive interest in my prose style, especially in regard to its phallic qualities, or lack thereof. He finds it ‘soft and enervated’, ‘flaccid’, ‘limp’ and ‘feeble’, and he imagines that Orwell would be ‘roused’ to anger by its ‘sheer floppiness’. I am grateful for this criticism and in future will heed Iron Frank’s call ‘to stiffen a few sinews and summon up some blood’.
Michael Shelden
Indiana State University
