by Tom Rosenthal
The Daily Telegraph, 27 June 1998
One day in October 1971, Sonia Orwell telephoned me to say that she'd just read a wonderful review of a book of essays on her husband, edited by Miriam Gross, a close friend of hers. Who was this man Bernard Crick, she wanted to know. "A brilliant, left-wing political theory professor," I said. "Well," replied Sonia, "he's the man to do George's biography."
In those days, I was managing director of Secker and Warburg, Orwell's publishers. I wasn't going to point out that Crick, while clearly a dab hand on the student revolutions of 1968, was not, as far as I knew, an author of biographies. Instead, I asked her if she was really sure, since he was a very eminent man in his field and I couldn't trifle with his affections if she might then change her mind. Sonia was sufficiently categorical in her assurances to me that I lunched with Crick and made him an appropriate offer. "But I've never written a biography before," he said. I responded: "But Professor Crick, you could say the same of Michael Holroyd before he tackled Hugh Kingsmill and Lytton Strachey. You have to start somewhere."
So Professor Crick became Bernard, and he agreed. From Orwell's American publishers, I had extracted a huge advance for Crick, on the promise of which he decided generously to endow a George Orwell Memorial Essay Prize. Unfortunately, when I sent Sonia the first draft of the opening chapters, she not only disapproved but told the American publisher that she disapproved - on the grounds that she believed that Crick did not properly understand either Orwell or his milieu. He promptly cancelled the contract and Sonia tried to do the same. And Sonia in full flight was an awesome spectacle. Even socially, she could set one's teeth on edge. She was a generous hostess, who always made sure her guests had lots to drink, did not herself notably abstain, and felt she had a God-given right to be frank. Although very properly brought up, she did not know the prohibition on "personal remarks", telling me, for example, that my new beard looked quite ridiculous.
Sonia once went berserk over a single word on the jacket blurb for an Orwell reprint and demanded the pulping of 20,000 large books. She objected to the description of Nineteen Eighty-Four as a novel of "prophecy" as she felt it was merely a warning. Few could argue that totalitarianism took a shape uncannily like that which Orwell described. I offered her lunch, she specified the White Tower, and I arrived two minutes early to find her and her agent ensconced way ahead of me in the tiny bar area, clearly not wishing to greet me. I went straight to my regular table. The delightful Irish co-owner Eileen Stais brought me a drink and said: "Isn't that Miss Brownell?" I admitted that it was, and congratulated her on her memory of the old Horizon days, when Sonia Brownell worked as Cyril Connolly's assistant. Sonia had known Orwell well for a matter of months and was his wife for 14 weeks before he died. As others have pointed out, she married a man called Eric Blair, who died. She then married a distinguished academic called Pitt-Rivers, but got divorced. She chose, however, to use none of her three legal names but insisted that she always be known as Mrs Orwell.
As Mrs Orwell, she kept me waiting at my own table for half an hour, in plain sight, before deigning to sit and break bread with me. Hospitality rules meant as much to her as personal remarks and my character and professional competence were shredded for a full hour. The shredding was accompanied by the constant threat to remove the entire Orwell oeuvre from the publishing house and take it where it would be better understood and cherished. These threats could not be carried out as they would be against all known contract law and therefore impossible even to contemplate in a rational world. I held my tongue and agreed to reprint the offending jackets as I knew that this current storm was a trifle in comparison to what I suspected would lie ahead on Crick.
In David Plante's beautifully etched memoir of Sonia in his book, Difficult Women, he quotes her, obviously in a different context: "I did it again. I put on my act, my widow of George Orwell act. Was I awful?" Reprinting those offending jackets to change a single word was, alas, in no way useful when the real war began. She really hated what Crick had written. Sensing my determination to publish, she repeated her bizarre threat of removing Orwell's oeuvre from the publishing house. It was as invalid an idea then as it had been earlier. I was even asked to transfer the Crick to another imprint within the group. Equally pointless. As Crick wrote in his entertaining memoir of the whole affair in Granta: "Tom Rosenthal held out desperately, as if at Verdun, against Sonia's attacks." I can't claim any heroism in all this. I was simply bloody-minded enough to believe that someone so briefly married to a literary icon had no moral or legal right to seek to suppress a book honourably commissioned and written, simply because she did not like it and regretted her original decision.
Her letters to me became ever more minatory and at one point my senior editorial colleague, John Blackwell, whom I had asked to analyse the various points made by Sonia against Crick, to see how many of them were sustainable, wrote to me a note at the end of his report. He abbreviated the combatants, Sonia and Crick, into S & C: "If for S you read Scylla, for C, Charybdis, I begin to have a sneaking sympathy for Ulysses!" The tone of Sonia's correspondence to me became blistering. She insisted on disowning the book, demanding that the words "official biography" not be used. "I note," she wrote to me, "you finish your letter to Crick 'With warmest regards.' I cannot say the same to you."
Finally, in the winter of 1980, Crick's biography was published to the acclaim of virtually everyone other than Sonia's friends and sold extremely well. I had found Crick a new and enthusiastic American publisher and, a few months later, we made one of those unenforceable post-prandial pacts to collaborate on a book about all the difficult widows of writers and artists we'd known. When sobriety returned the idea was, quite rightly, abandoned and I devoted my Orwell energies to two other projects. The more modest of the two was to publish in 1984 a facsimile of the surviving partial manuscript of Nineteen Eighty-four. However, while dabbling in the facsimile, I was determined to convert the try of the Crick biography into a goal. Sonia, who had died round about the time Crick was published, had maintained that the four-volume The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, which she had edited with Ian Angus and published in 1968, was all that was needed. In both blurb and introduction she set out Orwell's injunction against a biography and stated that the four volumes " 'stand in' for an autobiography".
While this was manifestly absurd, it was also somewhat economical with the truth. In terms of poetry publishing, a Collected does not mean Complete, but in the case of prose a layman might well believe that these four volumes were all there was. But here too, Sonia had exercised restraint on our experience and knowledge of Orwell's work. Even on Sonia's admission, the four volumes were woefully incomplete. So I had a dream of an endless shelf containing everything Orwell had ever written and, in particular, containing what Sonia, for good reasons or bad, had suppressed or, to be charitable, had been unaware of. Letters in particular are always intractable when it comes to completeness. With Sonia no longer in a position to forbid the inclusion of the missing material, it seemed like a fairly straightforward matter, even if it was clearly going to be a long haul.
I was extraordinarily lucky in finding one of those great academic editors, without which these huge sets simply remain dreams and never actually get printed. Peter Davison was asked to do first a definitive edition of the nine complete books by Orwell other than the letters, etc. He started work in 1981, even though they were not published until 1986-87, partly because three volumes were printed from proofs which were not the finally corrected set and had to be pulped. In the late summer of 1982, the Davisons and I coincided in Washington and, in the bar of the Watergate, where I was staying, I commissioned Peter to do the ultimate, definitive, absolutely complete version of the Essays, Letters, etc. I left Secker's in 1984 (an auspicious year, perhaps) but continued to meet Peter occasionally. Originally, the Essays etc were estimated at six volumes rather than four. It became a standing joke between us that my greeting to him became not "How are you?" or "How's Orwell coming along?" but "Well, Peter, how many volumes is it now?" Six became seven, seven became eight, and so on. But at long last, some 14 years after I left Secker's, during which time I have had some five successors and Peter Davison has laboured for six different owners, I can at last see the dream come true. The total number of volumes is 20 and the Essays etc have grown to an astounding 11 volumes.
I'd like to make just one further point about Orwell. All my life as a book publisher I have checked the six-monthly royalty statements sent out to authors and their estates. I've done this partly to head off trouble since, understandably, nothing so annoys an author as an accounting error in the publisher's favour. Partly also, it's a wonderfully efficient way for any publisher to see what's really selling and what's become stagnant. For years at Secker's I would add up the joint earnings of that extraordinary backlist of foreign authors, who included Franz Kafka, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, Italo Svevo, Robert Musil, Andre Schwartz-Bart, Italo Calvino, Yasunari Kawabata, Colette, Yukio Mishima and many more. Every six months the Orwell estate earned approximately twice as much as all the others put together. I used to attribute this solely to traditional British xenophobia. Now, contemplating this great Complete Works, I'm not so certain. It surely also has to do with the fact that Orwell was, and still is, the writer who speaks most directly and powerfully to a British audience, beyond the classroom and the "set book" syndrome, in a language and a style and about ideas which will never fade.
