by D. J. Taylor
The fault, it soon becomes clear, lies in her upbringing, to which Bowen devotes many a fascinated paragraph. Portia’s father and his second family turn out to have spent most of their time as shabby-genteel continental tourists. As Portia remembers it: ‘When we took flats, they were in people’s villas. Mother liked that, in case something should happen. But lately we lived in hotels . . . But mother and I got fond of it, in a way. We used to make up stories about the people at dinner, and it was fun to watch people come and go.’ Set down in holiday resorts before the fashionable crowds have arrived (‘when the funicular was not working yet’) her adolescence is a matter of ‘skidding about in an out-of-season nowhere of railway stations and rocks, filing off wet third-class decks of lake steamers, choking over the bones of loups de mer, giggling into eiderdowns that smelled of the person-before-last’. All this can seem uncomfortably close to the early lives of some genuine Lost Girls, as are some of the manifest deficiencies of Portia’s education. Sent to a private tutor’s establishment in Cavendish Square, which offers ‘classes for delicate girls, girls who did not do well at school, girls putting in time before they went abroad, girls who were not to go abroad at all’, she is described as being ‘unused to learning. She had not learnt that one must learn.’
If Portia is essentially passive, ripe to be imposed upon and embarrassed (as when Eddie, assuming the role of boyfriend, decides to interrupt her stay at the seaside with Anna’s old governess), then Jill, in Julian Maclaren-Ross’s ‘Five Finger Exercises’ (1942) seems a much more forceful proposition. For its time, a surprisingly explicit account of a painter’s seduction of a teenage girl in a hotel on the Sussex coast, the story rests, once again, on its heroine’s oddity, her complete detachment from most of the constraints of contemporary life. Thirty-year-old Jocelyn, coming upon her unexpectedly in the hotel lounge, immediately senses her naivety, but also her matter-of-fact willingness to be taken advantage of. Cross-examination reveals that she has run away from school (‘I just got tired of it’) to live in London and work in a department store. Don’t her parents object, Jocelyn wonders. ‘They don’t know where I am.’ Declaring herself bored by respectable people (‘they’re too dull’) and intrigued by the details of his professional life (‘I suppose you paint women in the nude’), Jill consents to be taken upstairs (‘She did not know much about kissing but she improved a little as the afternoon wore on’). What really animates her, once the deed has been accomplished, is Jocelyn’s promise to paint her portrait.
Most of Maclaren-Ross’s fiction is narrowly autobiographical. There is no reason to suppose that ‘Five Finger Exercises’ is any different. And as Lost Girl studies go, he has strong claims to be regarded as one of its founding fathers. His short story ‘A Bit of a Smash in Madras’ was one of Horizon’s early discoveries, and he left a striking portrait of Connolly as editor, lounging indolently around the office at Lansdowne Terrace in school-masterish tweed jacket and baggy flannels (‘one had the impression that he should have been eating grapes, but at the same time his half-closed eyes missed nothing’), discovered at his table at the Café Royal with a bulging leather satchel and a pile of galley proofs unfurled on his knee. In Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), set in the arctic winter of 1946–7, Maclaren-Ross features as the end-of-tether literary man ‘X. Trapnel’, writing parodies and book reviews for a magazine called Fission, dealing with its highly efficient editorial assistant Ada Leintwardine (Sonia) and falling calamitously in love with the man-eating Pamela Widmerpool (a projection of Barbara) who, as a parting gesture when their relationship breaks down, throws the manuscript of his unpublished novel into the Regent’s Park Canal.
All of which brings us back to the one person capable of uniting the Lost Girls into a single point of focus. For nearly every road in this narrative, it is fair to say, leads back to Cyril Connolly who, at various times in his life, was married to Barbara, engaged in a nine-year (but far from exclusive) relationship with Lys, regarded Janetta as his ‘muse’ and was thought to have matrimonial designs on Sonia while also conducting affairs with women such as Joan Eyres-Monsell and Diana Witherby who were part of the Horizon circle. Four and a half decades after his death, it is difficult to convey the sheer fascination with which Connolly was regarded by the people who knew him in the years before and after the Second World War. Part of it, naturally, was down to his outstanding intellectual gifts. He was one of the most forceful literary critics of the mid-twentieth century, and as such a decisive influence on the generation of writers who followed in his wake: ‘Sir’, a deferential Philip Larkin is supposed to have said when they met at Auden’s funeral, ‘you formed me.’ Far more, though, took in the pull of his personality and the paralysing mystique he had created for himself – a mystique that the people closest to him were expected enthusiastically to propagandise and share.
To know Connolly was, instantly, to be a part of his schemes, a subscriber not merely to Horizon but to all kinds of additional plots and subterfuges, whose participants were often wholly ignorant of the roles they were expected to play. One testimony to Connolly’s significance in the literary world of the 1940s – several other worlds that extended beyond it, if it comes to that – is the large numbers of memorial notices he attracted. Nearly every literary man or woman born in the first thirty years of the twentieth century left some account of their dealings with ‘Boots’, as his convives christened him, in testimony to Virginia Woolf’s complaint about ‘that smartiboots Connolly’. Not all this reminiscence is favourable. Some of Connolly’s old friends have mixed feelings. (Stephen Spender, while praising the ‘person of exceptional intelligence and sensibility’ on display in Clive Fisher’s 1995 biography, ‘can only see the Cyril who exploited me, as he did many other people’.) Others think his influence largely injurious. But none of them is in any doubt of his significance to the worlds through which he moved or to the people who were caught up in his self-aggrandising wake.
In the territory of personal relations, the Connolly mystique was, at heart, a matter of constructing patterns, fashioning a kind of emotional maze at whose endlessly conflicted centre lurked the tantalising figure of Cyril himself. The ever-charitable Spender believed that the things that were notorious about him (notably ‘his having love-affairs with two or three women at a time’) were not so much cynical or heartless but the result of straightforward solipsism, the egotistical firework displays of ‘someone who had formed a psychological theory about himself and considered that everyone concerned with him should agree that he had to perform this, even if doing so was sacrificial to them.’ ‘[Q]uick under the fat, disloyal, an admirable destroyer. A great taker of quiet notes,’ his old friend Alan Pryce-Jones decided. ‘Easily wounded, unforgiving, dislikeable, delightful.’ As to what Connolly wanted, whether in the sensual realm or anywhere else, the short answer is power. If so, it was power of a relatively subtle sort, in which friends and lovers were expected to circulate around him and indulge his habit of playing them off against each another while affecting not to mind the dizzying levels of capriciousness and obstinacy that were periodically on display.
Curiously, none of this seemed to affect the esteem in which he was held, or the loyalty – sometimes amounting to unfeigned devotion – he regularly attracted in his acolytes. Spender, again, lunching with Diana Witherby shortly before Connolly’s death, noted that ‘She was very loving about him but told me it was true he was cruel – punishing – to women. She said the worst thing she found when she had her affair with him was that he not only deceived her, but that he liked doing so – took pleasure in telling lies.’ And yet Diana, as she acknowledged, continued to be besotted by Connolly, tracked his career, looked on enviously as he pursued other women in locations where she herself could no longer follow. ‘I was terribly jealous of him being in Paris,’ she told Janetta, long after their affair had come to an end, while experiencing ‘a strange feeling that it should be me he writes to there. Dog in the manger? Or rat
her bitch in the manger – Yes, but we had a lot of Paris together.’
All this raises the question of why so many women put up with Cyril, tolerated his self-absorption and the peculiarities of a moral code that in the early years of the war allowed him to remark, without obvious irony, that ‘I shall never believe in women again. I have been perfectly faithful to two women for two years, and now both of them have been unfaithful to me.’ The answer lay less in any physical attractions he might have possessed – these were negligible – but in his superabundant charm. Give him a sympathetic companion, Quennell proposed, ‘ideally a sympathetic young woman’, and suddenly he was a different person. ‘The alert face appeared to absorb his jowls; his spider-eyes would dance with fun and malice.’ ‘Most lovely company,’ one of them remembered. ‘He always seemed to have an original, delightful new approach to something which made it worth your while being there and listening.’ If a first meeting with Connolly sometimes left only the impression of a titanic egotist aflame with condescension then long-term exposure to his conversational style usually steered his account firmly back into credit. ‘Pretentious and rude’, the novelist Anna Kavan briskly declared, only to revise her opinion to ‘really a nice guy under that super-intellectual façade’.
To a bright but undereducated girl with literary or artistic ambitions, this kind of attention was worth having, and the fact that, as one of his biographers notes, he ‘enjoyed creating romantic complications in his life’ and positively luxuriated in the guilt and unhappiness they brought, was very often a price worth paying for the uncertainty of your position. Equally enticing was the unshakeable evidence of his status, the file of celebrated writers who beat a path to his door, the aspiring youngsters who craved his company, his absolute conviction that posterity would judge him (and by implication those around him) quite as seriously as he judged himself. Spender remembered flying with him once to Brussels and watching, intrigued, as his companion took out a little notebook and scratched out an offending sentence. Connolly explained that he was erasing an unkind remark about a woman they both knew. Should the plane crash and the diary be recovered, he did not want it to be remembered as his last earthly comment.
Guilt. Deception. Boredom. Lofty ideals and promise unfulfilled. All these were Connolly’s stock in trade, part of a coruscating personal myth that, carefully burnished up throughout his adult life, went back to the world of his far from promising upbringing. For a man who spent much of his career on the fringes of the beau monde, enjoyed hobnobbing with duchesses and regarded the Ritz Hotel as his second home, his background was notably obscure. His father Matthew (‘British soldier, conchologist, stamp collector, expert on pedigree racehorses and lover of the culinary arts’, as a scientific database once put it) was an officer in the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, who spent his long retirement living in a hotel that adjoined the Natural History Museum, the better to pursue his life-long hobby of collecting snail shells. His son’s widely reviewed Enemies of Promise (1938) was followed a year later by his own much less well-publicised A Monographic Survey of South African Non-marine Molluscs, which took up all of 660 pages of Annals of the South African Museum. Well before this date Major Connolly had been deserted by his wife, Maud, who by the 1930s was living in South Africa with her husband’s former commanding officer, General Christopher Brooke. Mother-fixated Cyril kept constantly in touch.
Stocky, of medium height and unprepossessing in appearance (‘Is that the tug who’s been kicked in the face by a mule?’ a school contemporary wondered when his name came up), Connolly took a profoundly elegiac view of the world. If the present sometimes threatened to disintegrate beneath his hands, then the past could be endlessly ransacked for bittersweet consolation. One of the formative experiences on which he loved to dwell was the two years spent as a child in Cape Colony. This stirred a lifelong fondness for hot climes and balmy air: his idea of happiness, he once declared, was ‘to be writing a tolerably good book and travelling south in the company of someone your conscience permits you to love’. Another was his time at prep school, in this case the notorious intellectual forcing house of St Cyprian’s, in Eastbourne, where his contemporaries included George Orwell and Cecil Beaton. Even as a small boy Connolly claimed to be aware of the temperamental differences that separated him from the future author of Nineteen Eighty-Four: he was a stage rebel, he deduced; Orwell a real one. But it was Eton, to which he proceeded on a scholarship in 1917, that played the most crucial part in establishing the kind of person that he imagined himself to be. Enemies of Promise includes a bravura passage in which, visiting the school with his headmaster to sit the scholarship exam, he lingers on Windsor Bridge listening to two dandified exquisites appraising the technique of a boy in an outrigger passing beneath them. ‘Really that man Wilkinson’s not at all a bad oar,’ one languidly assures the other. To the thirteen-year-old eavesdropper, ‘the foppish drawl, the two boys with their hats on the back of their heads, the graceful sculler underneath, seemed the incarnation of elegance and maturity’.
Eton, with its idiosyncratic hierarchies, its studied out-of-dateness and its approval of individualism and wit, might have been made for Connolly. Whereas Orwell, in his four-and-a-half years on the premises, frankly idled, scraped into the Sixth Form at the late age of eighteen and left to pursue what was seen as a second-rate career in the Burma Police, Connolly, after a sticky start, carved out a niche for himself as a court jester and talented trifler, the boy who succeeds without conscious effort, whose hard work takes place offstage and whose affectations are always backed up by a dazzling catalogue of formal achievement. ‘Early laurels weigh like lead’, the mature Connolly once pronounced. His own teenage triumphs included a Brackenbury scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford, and his election to the Eton Society, ‘Pop’, a self-elected cadre of senior boys who more or less ruled the school. Keenly aware that most of the candidates were sporting aristocrats, Connolly never lost an opportunity to show his gratitude to Teddy (later Lord) Jessel, the boy who had helped him on his way. A friend who watched them reconnoitre each other in the 1960s thought it ‘the funniest thing I’ve ever seen, because it was as if they were back at Eton, with Cyril nervously deferring: “Do you think this champagne is all right, Teddy?” I was absolutely riveted because I’d never seen him in that position before.’
If Oxford, where Connolly trod water and played only a subsidiary role in the activities of the ‘Brideshead Generation’ of Waugh, Harold Acton and Brian Howard, would be remembered as a ‘three-year daydream’ culminating in a third-class degree, then there were still numbers of well-placed helpers anxious to recognise his talent and steer him in towards the high-powered employments that might suit his cosmopolitan tastes. His old Balliol tutor Francis Urquhart commended ‘a man of unusual ability’. John Buchan and Henry Newbolt, two of the grandest literary eminences of the day, were induced to read a sample of his correspondence and declared it ‘very vivid and interesting’. The American man of letters Logan Pearsall Smith took him on as confidential secretary, allowed him a salary of £8 a week whether he turned up or not and went so far as to pay off his creditors. By 1927 he was freelancing for the New Statesman – Pearsall Smith weighed in with a handy introduction to the literary editor – making his first big splash with a long, opinionated critique of the seven-volume Collected Works of Laurence Sterne before settling down to a regular fortnightly column reviewing the novels of the day. He was a coming young man, and the journalism he produced in the late 1920s was carefully designed to bolster the image he had devised for himself: at once satirical and disrespectful, informed and inquisitive, concerned – especially when discussing run-of-the-mill middlebrow novels – to tease out some of the social implications of the world that flows beneath their surface. ‘Almost the only novel-reviewer in England who does not make me sick’, Orwell declared.
Meanwhile, another part of the Connolly myth was shifting into view, a grand psychological edifice that occasionally threatened
to displace the self-absorbed reflections on whether one had succeeded or failed and whether success was worth the having in the first place. This was the question of his emotional life. Like several members of the Brideshead Generation – Evelyn Waugh and John Betjeman, for example – he began as an enthusiastic homosexual before switching to girls in his mid-twenties. By 1929 he had taken up with an eighteen-year-old American named Jean Bakewell, a Baltimore heiress so comfortably placed that when Connolly visited her family home he was startled to find that it contained more bathrooms, bedrooms and cars than people. A year later, with a £1000 a year allowance from Jean’s parents to sustain them, the newly married couple could be found inhabiting a rented house in the hills between Toulon and Marseilles, and embracing a lifestyle predicated on the ideal of ‘living for beauty’. Back in London they rented a spacious flat in the King’s Road, Chelsea, where, when not entertaining his friends, Connolly worked desultorily at a novel. The Rock Pool (1936), about the (non) activities of a group of wealthy expatriates filling in time in the south of France, was thought too shocking for British publication and had to be brought out by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press in Paris.
Was this ‘living for beauty’? Connolly – always a realist when the professional chips were down – had his doubts. Although Enemies of Promise, the book in which he managed to convert the neuroses and insecurities that governed his life into a paying proposition, was a success (‘the best book of criticism since the war’, Auden pronounced), he was darkly aware that he might not be making the most of his gifts. Here another essential ingredient of the Connolly myth declared itself: an eternal suspicion that the grass was greener on the other side of the fence; the thought that the position you had so carefully built up for yourself was, when closely inspected, doing you more harm than good. Jean might have given him the lifestyle he craved, but could it be that it was ruining him artistically? Might not the idleness and dependency that stopped him writing a succession of masterpieces be cured by a less sybaritic existence? And might not that existence have, necessarily, to be conducted in Jean’s absence? Late in 1937, with these arguments marauding through his consciousness, he fell in love with Diana Witherby – twelve years his junior and preparing to study at the Chelsea School of Art – and embarked on a relationship in which, as ever with Connolly, huge amounts of cake were had and eaten too. The next eighteen months passed in a welter of uncertainty and recrimination. Diana, appreciating the seriousness of the situation in which she had plunged herself, urged him to go back to his wife. Jean, exerting pressure of a more material kind, closed up the King’s Road flat, whose lease had expired, packed her bags and left for Paris. The husband who had wanted to live for beauty was abandoned to a Sloane Square hotel. By the spring of 1939, he was effectively homeless, spending much of his time at Cassis, a downmarket resort on the Bouches-du-Rhône, with a floating population of writers and painters.