by Ronald Weber
*
In the spring of 1941 the writer Kay Boyle and the art collector Peggy Guggenheim languished in close company for several trying weeks in Lisbon while waiting for seats on a Clipper flight. In Marseille both had been members of Varian Fry’s Committee of Patrons, with Guggenheim also one of his important financial backers. But their connection had a history that went beyond Marseille to expatriate Paris between the wars—and to the troublesome fact that Boyle’s current husband, the American painter and writer Laurence Vail, was Guggenheim’s ex-husband. Since Vail had custody of the two teenage children of the Vail-Guggenheim union, Boyle was now their stepmother. For these and other reasons there was no love lost between the two strong-willed women, yet they were brought together in Lisbon by Guggenheim’s ability to pay the high tab for their need of eleven spaces on a Clipper.
As was their custom, the women were accompanied by men. With Boyle in Lisbon was Laurence Vail, though their marriage was in shambles. She had fallen in love with a handsome, considerably younger, and moneyless Austrian baron with the imposing name of Joseph von und zu Franckenstein. To get her lover an American visa, Boyle had sought the help of Varian Fry, whom she impressed with her determination and striking appearance. “She was like her books: intense, emotional and very finely wrought,” he wrote. “She always wore small white-bone earrings cut in the form of the many-petaled flowers of the edelweiss, and her blue eyes seemed like [the dark-blue mineral] lapis lazuli.” Visa in hand, Franckenstein had left Marseille on the illfated voyage of the Winnipeg to Martinique. When Boyle, now in Lisbon, learned that he had been detained in Trinidad and would not be allowed to enter the United States without $500 deposited in his name in a bank, she approached several people for the money. Laurence Vail’s mother, at her son’s urging, finally came through, and eventually Franckenstein reached Miami. (In 1943 he became Boyle’s third husband.) Guggenheim, who had refused Boyle’s plea for financial help, angrily told Laurence Vail: “No, I’ll never forgive Daze [Kay Boyle] for the way she acted… . And you stood for it. You let her walk all over you. Why you even lent her money so she could get her lover out of France … you were an angel to that fiend.”
With Guggenheim in Lisbon was her present lover, the white-haired German artist and pioneering surrealist Max Ernst. (Varian Fry, who seemingly had an eye for earrings, wrote of Guggenheim that hers were “long crescents from the ends of which hung tiny framed pictures by Max Ernst.”) Later, in the United States, the art patron and the artist would briefly become man and wife, but in Lisbon their affair was seriously complicated by the presence of Leonora Carrington, a dazzlingly attractive young British surrealist painter whom Ernst considered his true love. Carrington was also waiting for transport to America; with her was a Mexican journalist and diplomat whom she would later marry, yet she spent her days with Ernst, who followed by spending his nights carousing in Lisbon with Laurence Vail. Guggenheim was distraught at Carrington’s reappearance, but emotional upheaval was a familiar state and she managed to endure this latest episode. One day Ernst and Carrington came to her hotel room, and she had the sense that Ernst was being returned to her. Whether from relief or generosity, when time came to leave Lisbon in the company of Ernst, she said she would also pay Carrington’s plane fare to New York. Carrington declined the offer and took a ship.
Along with men, Boyle and Guggenheim had seven children with them, ranging in age from two to eighteen. Six bore the surname Vail, with Guggenheim the mother of the two oldest; the seventh was a teenaged French girl, a schoolmate of one of the Vail daughters, who was being taken to America to stay with her grandmother in New Orleans for most of the war. (She would be the only member of the traveling group whose Clipper ticket Guggenheim did not provide.) With no schooling or friends to occupy them, the children were bored and restless. After two weeks in Lisbon—Guggenheim in a hotel with the French girl and her son and daughter; Ernst, the Vails, and their children in a pension—the entire party shifted to a hotel near the sea in Monte-Estoril to escape the city heat. Now there were beach outings to help fill the time and jaunts to nearby Cascais and Sintra. But within the confined quarters of the hotel, where the group occupied an entire floor, the crosscurrents of stress and grievances were only increased. “Our life in the hotel was rather strange,” Guggenheim said of the time.
Boyle, generally thought a caring mother when not devoted to her typewriter, chose to avoid the strangeness by checking into a Lisbon clinic for what she claimed was sinus trouble. She visited Monte Estoril on Sundays, leaving the bulk of parenting to her husband and Guggenheim but mostly in the hands of the older children. Dinners with everyone around a vast table in the hotel dining room were often the occasion for emotional scenes touched off by Laurence Vail bemoaning to the children his wife’s absence. Once in a café he became so angry when one of them defended Boyle that he lifted the top off a table and flung it at the child. He missed, but the infuriated owner ushered everyone from the premises.
To lighten the atmosphere of hotel life for the children, the adults tried stunts meant to be amusing. Max Ernst came to dinner one night with his hair dyed turquoise with mouthwash. Laurence Vail picked up a young prostitute and treated her to ice cream at a café in Estoril. The girl became attached to the group—she was “our only native friend,” Guggenheim noted—and each day she was found waiting for them on the beach. For their own entertainment, two of the adults, Guggenheim and Ernst, went swimming at midnight. Once Guggenheim did so in the nude, despite the strict swimwear code enforced by the police, while Ernst—apparently less concerned with her arrest than his financial future—wailed from the beach, “What will become of me if you drown?” After the swim Guggenheim dried herself off with her chemise, following which she and Ernst made love on a raincoat spread on rocks. Thereafter they went to a hotel bar, where she hung the chemise on the bar railing. “Max loved my unconventionalities,” Guggenheim remarked of the escapade.
On July 13, 1941, the four adults and seven children at last flew off to New York. Reporters and photographers were on had to greet their arrival, as was Laurence Vail’s mother, who earned Guggenheim’s gratitude by reimbursing her for the cost of the tickets of her son, his wife, and their children. News stories listed the names and ages of all the children and gave capsule accounts of the adults. Guggenheim, identified as Miss Marguerite S. Guggenheim, and Maxmillian Ernst were said to be traveling with the Vails. It was announced that Ernst, as a German citizen, would be taken to Ellis Island for a hearing. Guggenheim revealed that her collection of modern art, shipped to the United States three months earlier, had apparently reached the country safely. She valued the pictures at fifty thousand dollars.
But most press attention went to the Vails and their flock of children. An Associated Press photographer got all six together for a seated picture, with Laurence Vail holding a pipe and looking remote, and Kay Boyle, in the motherly center of the group with her dark hair setting off her white earrings, holding her youngest child on her lap. Later, Boyle gave a long interview to Robert van Gelder, which appeared in the New York Times Book Review. “Kay Boyle, Expatriate,” as the headline had it, said that after the struggle of escaping Europe she was anxious to begin writing again, especially short stories for the popular magazines. “While waiting in Lisbon,” she noted, “I read all the American magazines,” but she acknowledged it might be difficult to fit her manner of writing to the requirements of mass-market editors. “Does my style seem involved?” she asked rhetorically. “It doesn’t to me.”
*
After the great refugee rush through France and Spain tapered off, most Lisbon celebrities were on their way to or from Britain or the United States or had come to Portugal on goodwill propaganda missions. With the latter, the whole point was to make as much public use of them as possible. When the eminent photographer Cecil Beaton arrived on such a mission in the summer of 1942, however, no one at the British embassy had been told exactly what he was to do.
En
gaged in war work for the Ministry of Information, Beaton had come from more than three months in the Middle East, where he had been on loan to the Air Ministry to photograph RAF activity in Egypt and elsewhere. The delicious contrast of Lisbon’s security and abundance gave him the feeling of being back on prewar holidays in Spain or the south of France. The British embassy booked him into the Aviz Hotel, which with its thirty-odd rooms struck him as more a magnificently overdone Victorian mansion than a hotel. He basked in the luxury of an ornate bedroom with a balcony, then went for a three-course luncheon in the hushed, rose-tinted dining room. The only suggestion of a world at war was that a shortage of coal for electricity meant the hotel’s lights went off after ten o’clock at night, a slight inconvenience that paled when he realized he could send letters from Lisbon to friends—Gertrude Stein, for one—still living in occupied countries. How strange it was, he also noted, to realize “one could even have written to an enemy if one wished.”
Beaton spent his unhurried days on taxi tours of the city with the knowledgeable British press attaché Marcus Cheke as his guide. One memorable trip was up into the Alfama along, as Beaton recorded in his diary, “huddled streets hung with balconies, bird-cages, morning glories and washing.” From the heights of the ancient area of Lisbon, the jumbled roofs below seemed to Beaton’s artist’s eye “like a patchwork quilt with the texture of coarse weaves.” An excursion to Sintra and its “Cinderella-like” structures gave him the different sensation of coming upon a “startling display of architectural fireworks.”
When word finally came that London wanted him to photograph Salazar and Carmona, other major government figures, and a host of local grandees in an effort to enhance pro-British feeling in the country, Beaton finally had his mission. He set about making the complex arrangements for sittings, with embassy figures cautioning patience, and then more patience. Over time, as he noted in his diary, an unvarying ritual developed when he at last approached his subjects: “first the production of cards, then a short delay, long corridors, at last effusive welcomes.” Following his final sitting—an admiral who commanded the Portuguese navy—Beaton dropped his Rolleiflex on a stone staircase. Unwisely, it was the only camera he had carried with him when he went to the Middle East—and thus a convincing sign, so he decided, that he should return to England. He was back in London when in December 1942 fifty-six of his Portuguese portraits were exhibited at a Lisbon studio.
*
Rose Macaulay’s stay in Lisbon a few months later also resulted in productive work in the form of research for an historical account of the long record over eight centuries of journeys to Portugal by her British countrymen. Beyond absorbing some feeling for Portuguese life as the traveling English might have known it and looking into local research material, there was no vital need to make a dangerous wartime effort to follow in their wake. London libraries held nearly all the material she needed. But Lisbon offered something she herself badly required at the time: a respite from bombed London and personal grief.
On the night of May 10, 1941, a German bomb destroyed the building in London where Macaulay had a much-cherished flat. “I now have nothing,” she wrote a friend. “I came up from Liss [a village in Hampshire where one if her sisters had a home] at night to find Lux [Luxborough] House no more—bombed and burned out of existence, and nothing saved. I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with.” It was her bookless state that seemed most cruel. At age sixty, Rose Macaulay, with some twenty novels as well as works of poetry, essays, and criticism behind her, was a notable figure in British literary circles. Books were her life, and though she could and did find another London flat, her large library of some fifteen hundred volumes, most dating from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, was hard to replace.
A more painful and enduring blow came in July of the following year with the death of Gerald O’Donovan, the great love of her life. Irish born, a former Catholic priest, a minor novelist, and married, O’Donovan and Macaulay had met while both were British civil servants during World War I, and their relationship continued off and on until his death. An intensely private person despite leading an active social life, Macaulay chose to keep the relationship hidden, and much that is believed about it comes through hints in her letters and her fiction. What is certain is that she was deeply affected by the death of the man who, in a letter to a friend, she acknowledged as “the dearest companion.”
He died on July 26th. I had spent the day before with him, and he knew me and talked to me, and had been asking for me, but was only partly there. Then, late in the evening, he became unconscious and died next morning. I wasn’t there then, but didn’t want to be. I feel empty and dead, and without purpose. I’d like to get right away—to Portugal if I could… . I think an entire change of scene would help me begin life again.
The desire for a change of scene was understandable, but why flee to Portugal? The obvious explanation was that travel to the country, which she had never visited, was the focus of her planned book. Another reason was that Portugal was accessible in wartime. Switzerland was equally neutral, but Macaulay noted in a magazine article written shortly after her return from Lisbon that in contrast to Portugal it was a “a moated fortress, impregnable, enemy-barred, without approach.” Since her book subject tied into the extended history of Anglo-Portuguese relations, Britain’s Ministry of Information considered her a goodwill ambassador, and space was found on the London-Lisbon air route. Before she set out on the journey, Portuguese censorship reared its head with a requirement that books she was taking with her had to be brought to the embassy in London to be read (in theory) and sealed. Amused, Macaulay considered including a work that might cause a modest flap.
She arrived in Lisbon in early March 1943 and stayed until May. She settled into a modest hotel on the Avenida da Liberdade, one she later recommend to her friend E. M. Forster, and was given morning work space in a room at the British Institute. The Institute held the collection of the Lisbon branch of the Historical Association of Great Britain, which had gathered material on the British in Portugal. She was helped in her work, and in negotiating Lisbon, by a young staff member, C. David Ley, who spoke and read Portuguese, frequently contributed articles on literature and history to the Anglo-Portuguese News, and would become a close friend. Another important contact in Lisbon was Susan Lowndes, a well-known member of the local British community and married to the editor and publisher of APN, Luiz Marques. Lowndes was equally well connected in England. Her father, Frederick Lowndes, worked for the London Times, and her mother, Marie Belloc Lowndes, was the elder sister of the prolific man of letters Hilaire Belloc and a successful author herself.
An avid bicyclist in London, in Lisbon’s tilted streets Macaulay did her touring on foot and on the yellow trams, which struck her—as she wrote in an article for the APN contrasting Lisbon and London—as pretty as wasps humming on their way. Compared to London’s monotonous gray, Lisbon from every street was a riot of color:
golden ochre, rose-pink, terra cotta, the clear deep delphinium blue which is the blue of Lisbon, torrents of mauve wisteria cascading over a white wall, orange trees on the terrace above it, banners of gay garments pennanting a steep street from balconies of wrought iron… . And always sudden glimpses, down the steep slant of a street, of the Tagus, dull green, steel-blue, golden brown, grey-laced with jade green currents … and, faintly or deeply indigo beyond it, the line of the Setúbal peninsula.
Climbing with her into twisting lanes of the Alfama and to the heights of St. George’s Castle, Susan Lowndes thought Macaulay “looked not unlike the typical Englishwoman in a French farce: tall and very thin, her face crowned by a flat straw hat.” With David Ley as a guide, Macaulay also went to Sintra to see where Byron, among the British travelers she was writing about, had stayed. In Porto she did some poking about in archives, and she also visited Caldas da Rainha, where a few refugees were living while awaiting permanent resettlement.
“Portugal w
as lovely!” she wrote in a letter when she was back in London in May. “I had two months there, and enjoyed it all the time. Very interesting architecture; glorious weather; charming towns; wine, fish, and lots of material for my Great Work on the English in Portugal.” Ahead for her were two years of unceasing research before the manuscript was delivered to her usual publisher, William Collins, and promptly turned down, as she anticipated might happen, as far too long. Jonathan Cape then agreed to publish if the manuscript were radically cut. In September 1946 roughly half the work, more than four hundred pages, appeared as They Went to Portugal. Although the book sold surprisingly well, the second half did not see print until 1990 as They Went to Portugal Too.
*
While Rose Macaulay was in Lisbon the British Institute had given a reception for her and two other prominent visitors from England, Harold Spencer Jones, the Astronomer Royal, and Leslie Howard, the film actor, causing her to quip that one looked at the stars and the other was the star. The slender, urbane Howard, who in 1939 had played Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind and appeared in Intermezzo with Ingrid Bergman in her first American screen role, had left Hollywood in August of that year to direct, produce, and perform in inspirational films in his native Britain. In April 1943 he was persuaded to fly to Lisbon at the behest of the British Council to begin a lecture tour of Portugal and Spain that was meant to bolster the Allied propaganda effort in the two neutral countries. Accompanying him was Alfred Chenhalls, his accountant and financial adviser.
From Portella airfield the two were driven into Lisbon, the city unusually warm for April and Howard suffering in his English tweeds. Following a press reception at the local office of the British Council, Howard and Chenhalls switched their lodging from the Aviz Hotel to the Atlântico in Estoril. Here the air was cooler, and Howard had a room with a view of the beach and the sea, the setting reminding him of California. Dictating to a secretary, he began work on a scheduled lecture about film; more demanding was a second talk, to be given at the National Theater before an audience of professors and critics, on Hamlet. In addition to these and other appearances, Howard was the center of attention at a whirl of receptions, parties, and such special events as the showing at the British embassy of Pimpernel Smith, the anti-Nazi film he had made in Britain. At one gathering he met the British violin virtuoso Philip Newman, who had fled to Lisbon in 1942 and stayed on to become professor of violin at the National Academy of Music.