by D. J. Taylor
What did Sonia want? This was a question that exercised the minds of the people who knew her for upwards of forty years. Spender’s diaries are full of disquisitions on what made her tick and the unease and frustration that seemed to lie at her core. On the day of her funeral in 1980 he found himself thinking of the early days of their friendship back in the late 1930s. Then, Spender thought, she had the look of someone ‘always struggling to go beyond herself – to escape from her social class, the convent where she was educated, into some pagan aesthete world of artists and literary geniuses who could save her’. Sonia, he decided, had always been on the look out for a great man, a titan of art or literature, to whom she could devote herself and whose interests she could self-denyingly serve. On the other hand, the peculiar, twisted resolve she brought to this determination would always lead her into trouble. ‘Undoubtedly she had passionate loyalties – loyalty of some kind was her deepest nature and it transcended her disloyalty, which was the expression of her frustration at none of the people who were the objects of her passionate admiration quite responding’.
There was something misdirected about her efforts, Spender thought, one consequence of which was that the artists and literary geniuses she had in her sights were ‘always being faintly embarrassed by an enthusiasm that never quite hit the centre of the target’. What a friend who met her in the early 1940s calls her ‘innate rebarbative ways’ meant that the connections she wanted to make were rarely established in a manner that made her happy or brought very much satisfaction to the person at whom she had set her cap. And if some of these characteristics were on display at a very early stage in her career, even over lunch with Connolly and Spender at the Café Royal, then, as she grew older, they became more pronounced and made the puzzle yet more insoluble to the people who watched her go about her work.
One of the things Sonia certainly wanted was to escape from the constrictions of her upbringing, a series of advances and retreats in which loss, abandonment, genteel poverty and outright trauma all played their part. She was born in August 1918 in Ranchi, India, a child of the Raj whose early years might have offered promising material for the plot of a novel by Somerset Maugham. Charles Brownell, her father, was a Calcutta freight broker, who died four months after her birth in what looked to be deeply suspicious circumstances: at the early age of thirty-six, apparently of a heart attack while for some reason out at night on a golf course. Beneath the formal record of his death there ran hints of suicide, lost jobs, longstanding business problems suddenly rising to the boil. Within weeks his widow Beatrice had taken her two daughters – there was an elder sister named after her mother but known as Bay – back to England. Within a year she had married a chartered accountant named Geoffrey Dixon, who, coincidentally enough, was a director of Turner, Morrison, her late husband’s employers. The family returned to Calcutta, where a son named Michael – always adored by Sonia – was born in 1921.
From an early stage, the surfaces of the outwardly conventional upper-middle-class childhood that followed hid untold fractures and flaws. There was time spent with Vivien Hartley, the daughter of her mother’s best friend, who later became known as the actress Vivien Leigh. At six she was sent to board at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, a school in Roehampton made famous, or perhaps only notorious, by Frost in May (1933), a novel by its vengeful ex-pupil Antonia White. Meanwhile, things were going wrong in India, where Geoffrey Dixon, a serious drinker prone to erratic behaviour, was about to be sacked by Turner, Morrison.
By 1927 the whole family were in Liverpool, beset by illness – Michael nearly died of emphysema – and lack of money. Although sufficient funds were eventually amassed to send Sonia back to the Sacred Heart, then this, too, was part of the problem, for if the first institution that the teenaged girl burned to detach herself from was bourgeois family life then the second was a Catholic education. Always contemptuous of her schooling, she later wrote a Horizon piece about her ‘Jesuitical’ training (‘perhaps the most perfect weapon devised for trapping the child . . . no area of the human personality is safe from the priests’ probing cauterisation’), and is once supposed to have remarked at a hockey match in the hearing of a nun that ‘I’m so bored I wish I’d been birth-controlled so as not to exist.’ In her mid-twenties she could be found informing Diana Witherby that she still spat in disgust when she saw nuns passing in the street. At the same time, as her biographer Hilary Spurling points out, she was honest enough to realise that the nine years behind the Roehampton privet hedge had made her into the person she was, that as well as a loathing of religion and the people charged with inculcating it, she brought away from the Sacred Heart such virtues as honesty, loyalty and kindness. Work, as Spurling puts it, ‘was her substitute for faith’.
But what sort of work? And to what end? Unhappily, her mid-teens coincided with another crisis in the family’s affairs when her mother, strongly backed by Bay, walked out of her marriage. With three children to support and no regular income, this was a precarious step, but Mrs Brownell was a resourceful woman. By managing a number of small hotels and boarding houses until her divorce settlement came through, she eventually amassed enough capital to open her own modest establishment at 31 Tregunter Road, South Kensington. There are literary shadings here, for this is essentially the environment of Patrick Hamilton’s Craven House (1926) and J. B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement (1930) – a world of travelling salesmen hoisting their suitcases up creaking stairs, muted conversations in the aspidistra’s sickly shade and ill-assorted transients eating communally around the long dining table. Perhaps the most ill-assorted of all was Sonia herself. Like many a Lost Girl, her innate intelligence was compromised by the lack of a proper education. On the other hand, if no one at the Convent of the Sacred Heart had ever encouraged her to sit a public examination, then the staff included two zealous young nuns named Mary Allpress and Bertha Meade who gave her books to read and stimulated her interest in the literary world. Under their tutelage she won a leaver’s prize in 1935 for an essay entitled ‘Man is a Builder’, which expressed a belief that ‘Poetry . . . is the music and painting of the mind.’
As Sonia’s seventeenth birthday loomed, the question of what to do with a girl whose literary and artistic yearnings were balanced by a complete lack of educational qualifications loomed ever larger in Mrs Brownell’s imagination. In the end, the money was found to send her to Neuchatel in Switzerland to stay with the sister of a Protestant pastor named du Pasquier, whose daughter Madeleine was her age. Here she could take courses in French literature and language at the local commercial college and, it was assumed, enhance her prospects of employment when she returned to England. Everything went well until the day in May 1936 that changed her life for ever. The drama in which she was caught up was of sufficient magnitude to be reported on the foreign news page of The Times:
THREE DROWNED IN SWISS LAKE
ENGLISH GIRL RESCUED
FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT, GENEVA
On the previous afternoon, The Times reported, three students of Neuchatel University who had gone sailing on the lake – Madeleine and two boys named Jean-Pierre Roethlisburger and Paul Chappuis – were drowned in a sudden squall. ‘The fourth student in the party, a young English girl, Miss Sonia Brownwell [sic], of London, swam until rescued by a steamer.’ Returning to Neuchatel after a picnic on the far side of the lake, the party had run into trouble when a storm blew up: the boat collided with a beacon and capsized, throwing the occupants into the water. ‘They got a footing on the boulder on which the beacon was placed,’ the report continued, ‘and after 20 minutes righted the boat, but they could not get back into it owing to the violence of the waves. They clung to the boat for some time, the two young men supporting Mlle du Pasquier, who could not swim.’
Sonia, opting to strike out for the shore, was brought back to the upturned boat by the sound of screams. She could only watch as, one by one, the others disappeared into the water. As the second boy began to slip beneath the waves
he grasped at her. Without the strength to save him, and knowing instinctively that he would only drag her down, Sonia broke free, and after battling against the waves for over half an hour was herself picked up by a passing steamer and brought back to Neuchatel, together with the body of Mlle du Pasquier, which had been rescued by the steamer’s crew. The memory of that afternoon on the Swiss lake, together with its grim aftermath – among other duties she had to tell Madeleine’s parents what had happened – stayed with her for the rest of her life.
Back in England, traumatised and disaffected – there were rows with Mrs Brownell and Bay over her reluctance to help out at the boarding house – she enrolled on a secretarial course, moved out of the family home and took a room on the margins of Fitzrovia. Although there was no decisive breach with her mother and sister, Sonia always suspected that they disapproved of her and wanted her to lead a more conventional life. A letter from the mid-1940s describing her presence at a Brownell Christmas notes that she was ‘thinking it would be awful but it turned out to be wonderful . . . my family buried all their latent disappointment of me & were very gay + kind’.
Halfway between Bloomsbury and Marylebone, and bisected by the Tottenham Court Road, her new lodgings lay in bohemian territory, the world of faded backstreets and seedy antique shops immortalised by Anthony Powell’s A Buyer’s Market (1952), and the friends she made there – exotic and polyglot – would not have done for Tregunter Road. With two of these attendants – a Russian named Serge Konovalov and the Polish Eugène Vinaver – she set off on a summer tour of the Balkans. Both men were twice her age; each had designs on her. Journeying by car around Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania, their adventures included being chased by a pack of wolves through a pine forest and selling the car’s tyres to buy their way out of imprisonment in a Romanian jail.
Then, in the early part of 1938, almost by accident, came a decisive step, when she rented a room in a block behind the Euston Road. By chance it lay immediately behind the disused car showroom and repair shop to whose upper floor the Euston Road Art School had relocated a month or so before. Founded the previous October as a ‘School of Drawing and Painting’, and bringing together the talents of such young contemporary painters as Claude Rogers, Victor Pasmore and William Coldstream, the ‘Euston Road Group’, as the Bloomsbury critic Clive Bell would christen them, was known for what its members liked to call ‘objective observation’. Keen on such painterly qualities as subtlety and restraint, they aimed at a kind of realism that would be accessible to ordinary gallery-goers. Inevitably, this being the late 1930s, there were political overtones: Coldstream and his friend Graham Bell had recently spent three weeks in Bolton, lodging in a boarding house and painting cityscapes and factory chimneys as part of a Mass Observation art appreciation project intended to establish how local people would respond to paintings of their environment executed in a variety of contending styles. The titles of their best-known works – Coldstream’s St Pancras Station, say, Pasmore’s The Flower Barrow or Rogers’s Young Women and Children in the Broadwalk, Regent’s Park – give a good idea of the kind of effects they aimed at: an artistic landscape in which ordinariness, exactitude and formal English exteriors are sedulously combined.
Eighty years after its inception, the Euston Road School’s somewhat dutiful style of portraiture has not worn well: ‘Euston Road painting had a downbeat, low-key mood,’ Martin Gayford has suggested: ‘the colours were drab, there was an air of gloom.’ But Coldstream, Pasmore, Rogers, Bell and their associate Lawrence Gowing were Sonia’s kind of people. By degrees, here in the months before Munich and the slow, incremental build-up to the Second World War, she became what Anthony Powell, always a shrewd observer of artists and their camp-followers, would have called a ‘painter’s girl’. The students used to wave at her through the window of her room. Lawrence Gowing never forgot the vision of her combing out her hair as she sat looking up at the painters as they passed above her; Coldstream and Bell once climbed out on the roof to attract her attention.
‘With a round Renoir face, limpid eyes, cupid mouth, fair hair’, as Spender, who used to paint at the school, remembered her, she was a natural target for painters in search of a model. Sonia can be seen in Young Women and Children in the Broadwalk, Regent’s Park, although this was not done from the life – she sat for Rogers in his studio and was then painted into the existing canvas. Coldstream produced several ‘heads’ of her, his concern to reproduce her facial colouring so obsessive, an onlooker remembered, that he asked for samples of her make-up, the better to match the tones with his palette. But for all this resolute immersion in the late 1930s artworld, there are distinctions to be made. She was never a professional model. Neither, despite insinuations to the contrary, did she ever pose nude. As Spurling points out, the nickname she acquired at this time – ‘the Euston Road Venus’ – had a hint of irony. The artists and apprentices she came across in the Euston Road liked her enthusiasm and her seriousness – her passionate interest in what she regarded as important things – but they also found her overbearing and judgemental, bossy and sometimes presumptuous, with an intellectual reach that often exceeded its grasp.
Meanwhile, there were patterns emerging in her emotional life. Fatherless and erratically brought up, she tended to fall for older men who combined charm, courtesy and expertise, whose talent she esteemed and at whose feet she (sometimes literally) sat. Her first regular boyfriend was Pasmore, who was thirty; there were also relationships with Konovalov and Vinaver. By mid-1939 she had taken up with Coldstream, another man ten years older than herself, recently separated from his wife and their two small children. Much of what we know about her in the period 1939–41 can be divined from the letters they exchanged at this time, an immense thread of correspondence that began when, in advance of call-up, he took a temporary job at a boys’ private school while she went to stay at the painter Rodrigo Moynihan’s house at Monksbury in Hertfordshire. Coldstream was a punctilious suitor (‘You can’t think how lovely it was this morning getting a pink parcel of sweets’, runs one of her letters from November 1939; ‘it was absolutely lovely coming back and finding the roses’, begins another), but her replies, though expressing suitable concern for his welfare, are also freighted with hints about the life she was determined to lead. Describing an evening at nearby Sawbridgeworth, she complains that ‘There was a perfectly horrible young man called David Green there who was very drunk and gave lurid descriptions of the wonderful time the inhabitants of the offices of Horizon were having in London . . .’ Already there is combative mention of the special number she later discussed with Spender: ‘I hope you are well in on the “Young Painters” issue of Horizon because I don’t trust either Stephen’s or Cyril Connolly’s views on Art. Wasn’t the advertisement for it depressing in the Statesman?’
The courtship continued, with weekends at Monksbury and a secret meeting in London in early December. ‘It was lovely at Liverpool Street and I came back safely except that I lost my ticket but they believed me at Stortford when I said I had had one’, she reported back on her return. There was a part-time job teaching English to the child of a wealthy foreign family, during which she camped out in a room in Goodge Street, sittings at Vanessa Bell’s old studio in Fitzroy Square, and what seems to have been a visit to Dorset, where she remembered a day spent in a countryside deep in winter snow. Back in London, in the wake of her discussions with Connolly and Spender about ‘Young Painters’, she was moving ever closer to the Horizon world, helping out at Lansdowne Terrace and spending much of her spare time among Connolly’s associates.
An undated letter from Goodge Street describing a weekend spent at Lavenham in Suffolk with ‘Stephen, Humphrey and Cuthbert’ (these can be identified as Spender, Hugh Slater and the writer T. C. Worsley) is full of literary gossip (‘Raymond Mortimer is going to the Propaganda Ministry & the lit. editorship of the Statesman is free’) while giving a first glimpse of the equivocal relationship she would go on to pursue with Conn
olly’s co-editor: ‘He [Spender] was very nice but I can never quite feel at ease or natural with him because I feel a most innocuous remark might lead him to condemn one’s character entirely. But he is very funny . . .’ A later meeting when Spender came to tea produced further gossip about Auden and Isherwood’s exploits in America: ‘Auden’s doing nothing about the War except busying himself with rather inessential and impractical things such as the evacuation of children and so on.’
But the onset of war was rapidly dispersing the artists’ colonies of Fitzrovia. Coldstream was despatched to join an artillery unit in Dover, while Sonia acquired a job with a Mobile First Aid Unit attached to University College, London. She was solicitous of his welfare (‘Bill, I do hope you are getting all my letters as I do try to write to you quite often but I expect the delivery is very irregular and I wouldn’t be surprised if some didn’t get there as they seem to be bombing the railways quite a bit’) and, as the Blitz reached its height in the autumn of 1940, terrified to discover that Coldstream had been posted to a town immediately beneath the Luftwaffe’s flight path: ‘I saw a dreadful picture of Dover on the cinema yesterday which made me most alarmed. There didn’t seem to be any houses left standing at all. But perhaps as you are on the hill you are a little safer.’ As for her own involvement, the Mobile First Aid Unit worked in shifts accompanying rescue crews disinterring bodies from the rubble. Often going without sleep for days on end, frequently forced to confront scenes of utter carnage (Coldstream rated her ‘fearless’), Sonia sent regular reports down to Dover. ‘Well, we’re absolutely in the middle of it now,’ runs another undated letter from the early autumn. ‘The East End has been on fire for the last two nights . . . One’s entire life is quite disorganised . . . The nights here are amazing as everyone is really frightened and we haven’t had a proper sleep for three nights.’