ORWELL (GEORGE)


Typed letter signed ("Geo. Orwell"), to Sonia [Brownell], introducing François Duchêne who is very anxious to do some journalism and who might be useful to her, for although he is French he is bilingual and interested in contemporary French literature ("...I think he would like to write something about Claudel, but perhaps you could have a talk with him..."), 1 page, engraved letter-heading, small white (?typist's) mark at lower edge, 4to, Canonbury Square, 3 February 1947
|'HE WOULD LIKE TO WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT CLAUDEL' – ORWELL TO HIS FUTURE WIFE SONIA. Sonia Brownell had joined Horizon as Cyril Connolly's editorial secretary and working partner in 1945, having a brief affair with Orwell that year; marrying him in 1949 a few months before his death, and thereafter devoting herself to the administration of his literary estate and archive at University College, London. The Orwell archive at UCL contains just two letters from Orwell to Sonia: one written to her from Jura and dated 12 April 1947; the second dated 24 May 1949 and written from the sanatorium in Cranham Lodge where Orwell had been confined since January.François Duchêne (1927-2005), the subject of our letter, had just left the LSE, where he took a double first, and in 1948 was to be dispatched to serve the British Army as a lieutenant of Intelligence. From 1949 to 1952 he served as leader writer on the Manchester Guardian, his trenchant article bringing him to the notice of Jean Monnet, to whom he became a key advisor in planning the new Europe; at the time of his death holding an emeritus professorship at Sussex University. Hanns W. Maull wrote of him: 'In his international relations analysis, Duchene was as much, if not more, a poet as a strategic thinker... He once had used a scholarship which was supposed to support a study on arms control to produce a book on W.H. Auden' (Independent, 25 July 2005).Rather than pass Orwell's letter over to Sonia Brownell, Duchêne appears to have hung onto it; the present vendor having acquired it from his family after his death. Nor does he appear to have had anything printed in Horizon, about Claudel or otherwise. One cannot help thinking that Paul Claudel, with his controversial conservatism (famously memorialised by Auden in his poem on Yeats – 'Time that with this strange excuse/Pardoned Kipling and his views,/And will pardon Paul Claudel,/Pardons him for writing well') would have been a fitting subject for Orwell the essayist, as well as for Duchêne.