The news that a vast cache of material by and concerning George Orwell is about to be cast to the four winds in the wake of a corporate sell-off has stirred predictable fury among Orwell buffs. As in all the best literary rows, the contending roles seemed to be clearly defined from the outset. There were the heroes (Orwell and his many acolytes); there was a principal villain – the publisher Hachette, which had decided to unload its archive, only to find that no single bidder could meet the asking price; there was the agent of their devilry (more about him in a moment); and even some subsidiary baddies, in the shape of a clutch of rare book dealers who are now hard at work flogging off the individual lots.
A single handwritten, unpublished Orwell letter will probably set its purchaser back £10,000
All this, by the way, takes place in an exceptionally high-end marketplace. A single handwritten, previously unpublished Orwell letter, of which a few are still thought to exist here and there, will probably set its purchaser back £10,000. As for the Hachette treasure trove ornamenting the dealers’ catalogues, the firm of Peter Harrington is offering the papers relating to Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), for a cool £75,000. The file on his third, Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), is marked at £50,000. The rival establishment of Jonkers is advertising a collection of The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) papers for a more modest £35,000. The file on Animal Farm (1945) has already gone for £100,000. That amounts to more than £250,000 for the contents of a not very large crate.
How has this happened? Here a little context is in order. Each of the four titles mentioned above was first published by the fine old firm of Victor Gollancz Ltd. By the time of its founder’s death in 1967, Gollancz was somewhat less of a fine old firm: come the late 1980s, by then in a more or less moribund state, it had to be sold off to Houghton Mifflin. A decade later, after another round of industry reconfiguration and corporate pass-the-parcel, it became the property of the Orion Publishing Group, subsequently bought by Hachette. In 2018 Hachette decided to close the warehouse in which the material was stored and instructed Rick Gekoski, possibly the wiliest rare book dealer on the planet, to dispose of the contents. Failing to reach the £1 million valuation put on the archive as a whole, Gekoski was reduced to selling it piecemeal.
As it happens, I am familiar with the Gollancz Orwell files (there are many other celebrated authors involved, by the way, from Kingsley Amis to Ivy Compton-Burnett, and it would be nice to know what has happened to their leavings). Back in the early 2000s, working on Orwell: The Life (2003), I more than once managed to arrange for the Orwell papers to be sent up from the warehouse to Orion’s premises in St Martin’s Lane so that I could take a look at them. Everyone was very helpful, although it had to be said that the security arrangements inclined to laxity. On one occasion, the box containing – among other choice items – Orwell’s bitter laments to Victor Gollancz about the editing of Keep the Aspidistra Flying simply disappeared, and it would have been perfectly possible for a less scrupulous operator than myself to walk off with anything that he fancied.
Twenty years later, in the middle of a corking spat about publishing ethics and the desirability of keeping literary archives intact so that scholars and biographers can work on them untrammelled by their owners’ caprice, I discovered that, curiously, my own attitude to the Hachette debacle was far less clear-cut than it would have been when I first had access to Gollancz’s bounty.
On the one hand, the best place for the material now being offered for sale by Messrs Harrington, Jonkers et al, is certainly the Orwell Archive at University College, London rather than – its most likely destination – the private vault of some American collector. On the other, publishers’ archives are marketable assets. Whoever did due diligence on the Gollancz warehouse when the firm was first put up for sale in 1989 would doubtless have realised that its contents were probably worth more than all the firm’s existing contracts put together. In these circumstances, it is difficult to blame Hachette for wanting to make some easy money, and even more difficult to blame them for the archive’s subsequent dismemberment. And in some ways, at any rate from the biographer’s point of view, corporate inflexibility is less irksome to deal with than the other hulking storm cloud that tends to hang over the affairs of any recently deceased author: the family they have left behind.
There is nothing that can be done about them, their word goes, they can be hell to accommodate, and all you can do is conciliate their whims. Hermione Lee, the biographer of Virginia Woolf, used to tell a horrifying story of her sit-downs with Valerie Eliot, T.S. Eliot’s widow and the keeper of his flame. When calling at Mrs Eliot’s flat, Lee was never allowed to enter the sanctum in which the great man’s letters were kept, but Valerie would occasionally favour her with a fragment or two snipped out of one with a pair of scissors.
The only solution is for writers to make arrangements for their papers’ dispersal after they die
The most arduous biographical chase I ever embarked on – this was for Orwell: The New Life (2023) – involved the papers of a man named Dennis Collings, whose wife, Eleanor, Orwell had wanted to marry before she became Mrs Collings in the Suffolk seaside town of Southwold in 1934. I spent long years cultivating Dennis’s daughter, custodian of the papers, but never managed to get past the door of the room in which they were housed on the grounds that the builders were ‘in’. Then, when Susannah Collings died, the Bonhams employee called in to make a preliminary survey of the contents, and deciding to investigate the woodshed, found a discarded handbag containing a buff envelope on which Eleanor, who died in 1962, had written the words ‘Burn after my death’. Inside were 19 of Orwell’s love letters.
The cat-and-mouse game that followed this discovery lasted an entire decade. To begin with, the letters were put on sale at Bonhams and then mysteriously withdrawn. The Collings family declined to answer emails. No rare book dealer, even Mr Gekoski with his ever-quivering antennae, had any idea what had happened to them. Finally, in 2018, a Norfolk art dealer – in fact, the same man who had found the letters in the first place – got in touch to say that the Collingses were prepared to sell. The whole cache was bought at vast expense by Orwell’s son, Richard Blair, who later presented it gratis to the Orwell Archive.
Naturally, philanthropists of this kind are extremely rare. It can confidently be predicted that, once sold, the Orwell papers now advertised in the dealers’ catalogues will never be seen again – a tragedy for Orwell scholarship as, although the Orwell letters they contain have all been printed up, some of the supporting correspondence between agents and publishers offers tantalising hints about Orwell’s whereabouts, opinions and plans in the mid-1930s. The only solution to these impasses is for writers to take a more active role in what happens to their papers and make arrangements for their dispersal after they die. You may not be able to retrieve ancient billet-doux of the kind that were found in the Collingses’ woodshed, but you can at least find out what your publisher has in the files and leave detailed instructions to your heirs.
Only the other day I had a look in the ancient box file where all the correspondence of the pre-internet era reposes. And there they all were – the furious letter from Martin Amis accusing me of traducing his father’s memory, the map of the British Isles with Alan Sillitoe’s wireless-operator annotations, the august postcards from A.S. Byatt. No idea what will happen to them, but they certainly won’t be left in an envelope marked ‘Burn after my death’ for posterity to dither over and ignore.
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