by D. J. Taylor
Interlude: On Not Being Boring
The externals of Lost Girl life are relatively easy to decipher. In so far as these things can ever be truly reconstituted, we have a fair idea of how Barbara, Lys, Janetta, Sonia and the others spoke, what they wore, how they went about their daily round and the kind of social promontories from which they regarded the world. Much less easy to determine is what went on inside their heads. What were the value systems they espoused? What, when it came down to it, were the qualities they esteemed? What sort of behaviour had them signifying their approval or registering their disgust?
Loyalty, naturally, stood at the head of the queue. If a single factor united the various women who worked on Horizon, or were gathered up in its slipstream, it was their regard – at once emphatic, paralysing and unconditional – for Connolly. It was not so much that they loved him, which at least half-a-dozen of them at one time or another professed to do, rather that his interests, endlessly interrogated and analysed, were so transparently their own. The reportage of the period is full of Lost Girls springing to Cyril’s defence, taking his opinions on trust, turning on anyone beyond the circle who has dared to call them into question. If bad behaviour could be detected, then it was theirs to rebuke: outsiders could keep their distance.
Almost as highly rated was intellectual ability, although – as with loyalty – there were substantial distinctions to be made. Just as the latter did not necessarily extend to sexual fidelity, so the former had to be cautious in its exercise. While ‘cleverness’ was an advantage, any descent into ‘showing off’ was likely to be roundly deplored. In Horizon terms, the ideal intellect – the ideal male intellect, it has to be said – was one that made a virtue of self-deprecation, hinted at profound depths of expertise and creativity while keeping its powder dry. The glancing remark was nearly always preferable to a gush of learned expostulation, and ‘wit’ could be guaranteed to trump rational sobriety.
All this leads us to one of the wartime literary world’s most salient characteristics: its faint air of amateurishness. Orwell, with his three articles a week and his day-job in the BBC’s Eastern Service, seems the doughtiest of professionals when set against a band of fellow-practitioners who sometimes seem to have made a positive virtue out of their non-achievement. Brian Howard’s shortcomings in this line are practically legendary, but Connolly, too, can sometimes look like a talented dilettante, a writer of almost limitless capacities who for some reason prefers never fully to extend himself and whose potential is never properly realised. This, after all, was a man whose attainments at the age of forty consisted of a slim novel, a critic’s autobiography, an even slimmer book of pensées and a file of book reviews.
Not that Connolly ever saw himself in this light. He belonged, as did Howard and many another literary gentleman of the time, to a tradition that prided itself on bringing off the well-nigh impossible trick of trying hard without being seen to do so, or in some cases deriving superiority from not trying at all. The Oxford philosopher Richard Pares once wrote a revealing letter to A. L. Rowse along these lines in which he complained about the success of such contemporaries as Quennell and Waugh, on the grounds that ‘I know I could do much better than they and I don’t want the trouble of doing so.’ This is the authentic note of the gentleman-amateur, who awards top marks for effortlessness and obliquity, wit and conversational pizzazz and would be appalled by anyone who commits the unpardonable sin of making a special effort to draw attention to themselves.
And what about the substantial percentage of the population for whom conversational pizzazz and personal resonance – the knack of irradiating a drawing room or an editorial sanctum merely by walking into it – are just a distant dream? They, alas, will always be found wanting, judged for their ability to keep the ball rolling and summarily dismissed.
If the Lost Girl and her admirers believed in loyalty, intellect and modesty, then their greatest enthusiasm seems to have been directed at those who could keep boredom at bay. Sincerity, perseverance and kind good humour were all very well, but of all the compliments directed at friends and lovers the warmest was the somewhat negative quality of not being a bore. ‘The only thing that concerned him,’ a relative once recalled of Eddie Gathorne-Hardy – born into an earlier generation, but the friend of several Lost Girls – ‘was whether people bored him or not.’ The women of Connolly’s circle could put up with a great deal: in the end, ill treatment, desertion, indifference, spite and jealousy could nearly always be tolerated. What they could not abide was tedium. ‘You see that dreadful old bore,’ Laura Waugh once remarked to her son Auberon about his father, a decade after the Horizon era had come to an end. ‘He used to be so witty and gay.’
9.
Sussex Place: Connolly, Lys, Janetta and Others 1945–9
I see signs of mounting hubris, I am afraid.
Peter Watson, letter to Cecil Beaton, 7 April 1946
If one key Lost Girl meeting point was the Horizon office at Lansdowne Terrace, then another – at any rate in the second half of the 1940s – was the big, multi-tenanted house at 25 Sussex Place. Connolly, Lys and Janetta all lived there for several years; Sonia was a regular visitor; guests came and went; and it was an ideal location for parties, whether of the informal kind, conjured out of half-a-dozen bottles of red wine and a telephone directory, or the more lavish, meticulously planned affairs in which Connolly delighted, such as the reception given to mark T. S. Eliot’s award of the Nobel Prize for Literature late in 1948. Elegantly furbished, home to Connolly’s collection of rare first editions, Connolly’s fine china and his elegant furniture – all the symbols of gentlemanly detachment by which their owner set such store – Sussex Place had the reputation of a high-class bohemian hotel, and yet the day-to-day life that went on behind its doors was far from idyllic.
As ever, it was Lys who did most of the work, telephoned the gasman, argued with Janetta over whether to sack the charwoman, Mrs Gough, organised the entertainments and tried to ensure that Horizon’s editor got to the office on time the following morning. Connolly was often late in settling the rent: Janetta, his co-tenant, was frequently reduced to leaving embarrassed notes on the stairs. Meanwhile, Major Connolly’s warning about the dangers of house-sharing had proved to be uncomfortably prescient. Connolly and Janetta were old copains, always able to subdue the momentary irritation that each occasionally felt for the other when living at close quarters, but her friends – younger and sometimes less respectful – were not always Connolly’s idea of agreeable company. It was Evelyn Waugh who noted, in the aftermath of one of Connolly’s visits, that ‘his joint tenure of the house in Regent’s Park is proving irksome. He maintains his habitual bewildered resentment when bohemians behave like bohemians.’
Other aspects of Connolly’s life seemed equally problematic. For all his delight in the newly expanded landscapes of the post-war world, the chance to travel and make plans, these were difficult times for the sage of Bedford Square. However much he had hated the war, with its dietary privations, the gloom of the blackout and the buzz-bombs falling on the Bloomsbury pavements, it had at least given his life a structure: Horizon, after all, had been intended to represent the values that Nazism imperilled. In Nazism’s absence, he seemed faintly directionless, unsure of his destiny, fearful that he might not be making the best use of his talents. To add to this disquiet was his relationship with Horizon’s readers, whom he sometimes suspected of resenting the high-class pleasure garden which they believed Connolly and his circle to inhabit. A piece about Osbert Sitwell that Alan Pryce-Jones intended to cast in the form of a letter stoked some characteristic fears about the gap between Lansdowne Terrace and the world beyond it.
I don’t think we can possibly publish it as it stands, you have no idea of how irritable and envious our public is. They can’t stand being left out of anything. You leave them out both of your pleasant holiday in Vichy and your cosy upper-class coterie life with ‘Osbert’, ‘Willie Maugham’ etc. This in 1946 i
s unforgiveable . . . You probably think I have gone off my nut, but the more I am attacked the more I study the psychology of these little folk whose whole life is spent in tying up us Gullivers.
All this begged the question of what might be happening to his own inner voice. One key aspect of Connolly’s progress through the 1940s was the gap between what the world thought of him and what he occasionally thought of himself. Coming across him sitting in panelled drawing rooms pronouncing on the literature of the day, most contemporaries saw a man who hobnobbed with the great writers of the era and was regarded by them with an esteem that sometimes bordered on adulation. Connolly, on the other hand, was increasingly conscious of his idleness, lack of commitment, inability to get things done. One aspect of this profound unease was the deterioration of his relationship with Peter Watson. The trip they took to Paris in July 1945 was intended as a triumphal return to the city that both men had loved, but a shock awaited them at Watson’s flat in the rue du Bac, now filthy and neglected, with most of its valuable collection of artworks gone missing and a pile of pawn tickets casting into doubt the Romanian caretaker’s claim that they had been stolen. All this was ‘terribly depressing’, Connolly complained, not least for its effect on Watson, whose commitment to style and sophistication seemed to have been replaced by a ‘morbid discomfort’.
But worse was to come. In Switzerland, on the next leg of their continental tour, Watson went down with jaundice. It was a debilitating attack – so serious that he was confined to bed for six months and at one point restricted to a diet of spaghetti and rice with mashed turnips and carrots. In this enervated state, from a clinic in Lugano, and with his travelling companion returned to London, he wrote several letters to his old friend Cecil Beaton, the principal topic of which is Connolly: Connolly’s sulks, Connolly’s character defects and, if only by implication, Connolly’s lack of interest in the work that Watson was paying him to undertake. ‘Cyril writes very gloomily of London, of being tied down to Lys, Horizon and his new house and complains of the cold dirt and dullness,’ runs a note from October 1945. ‘However he complains so much that one doesn’t understand much.’ A second letter, responding to something Beaton had written, is sharply critical. ‘I found his greed and his snobbery got terribly on my nerves in Switzerland,’ Watson began.
He is so vain, so touchy, so anxious all at the same time. I am quite the wrong person to deal with such a mixture over a busy period. He used to lose his temper with me in front of other people which I find quite inexcusable. Of course I know he is everything I am not, impulsive, enthusiastic, quickly deceived & satiated, easily distracted from one thing to another. He can never get over the fact that I won’t behave like a conventional rich man, always go to the best restaurant hotel, travel first class etc. I suppose the rich reassure him but it is horrifying to watch him making up to them & his contempt for people with different standards.
A third letter, undated but apparently written shortly afterwards, offers corroborative evidence: ‘I must just mention that Douglas Cooper who was here for the night yesterday & who knows a lot of Swiss people told me that everywhere he goes people ask him if Mr Connolly is only interested in food & they found they couldn’t raise a spark of enthusiasm when they mentioned literature or anything else, so my impression cannot only be due to bias.’ Much of this, naturally, was simply Connolly being Connolly, taking a positive relish in biting the hand that so generously fed him, celebrating the security of his position (beautiful girlfriend, elegant house, much-coveted job) one moment only to disparage it the next. The people who dealt with Connolly knew what he was like, and in the great majority of cases were prepared to put up with his temperamental shortcomings in return for the chance to luxuriate in the dazzle of his personality. All the same, Watson’s letters from Lugano strike a new note, in which a rueful acceptance of Connolly’s contradictions is replaced by something very close to exasperation.
The same ambiguity hung over Connolly’s relationship with Lys, now deep into its fifth year. The Paris trip with Watson was the longest stretch of time he had ever spent apart from her, and a letter sent back towards its end is practically lachrymose in its fervour: ‘I really can’t bear being away from you for so long, and I hope it will never happen again – a fortnight is the limit, after that one finds out the loneliness of everything in life except being with the loved one.’ It was not that Connolly was being insincere when he wrote this; he was merely playing his habitual trick of failing to see his life in context, so devitalised by his separation from Lys that he could not bring himself to consider what he really thought about the existence he had left behind him in London. But if Connolly was a creature of impulse, a short-term profligate bent on satisfying any emotional whim the moment it presented itself, then Lys had more definite objectives in view. At this point, after several years of stasis, her plan to persuade Connolly to marry seemed to be drawing closer to fruition. Her divorce from Ian Lubbock had come through. Simultaneously, a packet of legal papers sent from Reno, Nevada, the divorce capital of the United States, demonstrated that Jean was taking steps to separate herself from Connolly.
The only legal requirement that now remained, here at the end of 1945, was for Connolly to pilot the divorce through an English court. But this presupposed a fixity of purpose that Connolly had never possessed. Offered clarity and commitment instead of haziness and drift, he naturally back-tracked. ‘Did not ask you to divorce me but to come back,’ he cabled plaintively to America. Unable to chart a course to the altar, Lys did the next best thing, which was to change her name by deed poll. This transformation was effected on 10 January 1946, and come the spring the happy couple set off for Europe on a mock-wedding tour. (‘Lys has become Mrs Connolly (deed poll not the church!) and they have gone off to Zurich for their honeymoon! Can you beat it?’ Watson informed Beaton early in April.) After calling at Paris and Corsica, the Connollys ended up in Switzerland in the company of the artist John Craxton.
Meanwhile, back in England grand literary eminences continued to amuse themselves with such scraps of Connolly gossip as came their way, much of it cruelly attuned to what was assumed to be Lys’s subordinate role in their relationship. Nancy Mitford’s new nickname for Lys, borrowed from Quennell, was ‘the Mouse at Bay’, as in a letter to Evelyn Waugh from late February: ‘Have you heard about the Mouse@Bay? Some other women were saying how the virility of men is in relation to the size of their noses & the M@B jumped out of her chair & said “It is quite untrue. Cyril has a very small nose.”’
In the Connollys’ absence, the big house was left to Janetta and Robert Kee. Once again, the principal adult witness to the progress of their emotional life was Frances Partridge. Everything had been going ‘wonderfully lovely well’, one of Janetta’s regular letters to Ham Spray reported late in January, until Robert was threatened with a court martial for writing newspaper articles about his time in the POW camp, which he had forgotten to submit to the RAF censors. And Janetta had her own professional project in view to provide the illustrations to a childcare primer by her friend Dorry Metcalf. Issued in 1946 by the Pilot Press, Bringing Up Children was a particularly ironic commission when set against the accounts of life at Sussex Place later filed by its youngest inhabitant, Nicky Loutit. Intrigued by Connolly (‘Cyril was the king, even I knew that, and if he bothered he was nice to me’), fascinated by Lys and the perfume bottles that could be found in her bedroom, Nicky discovered that the main impediment to a settled existence in Sussex Place was Robert Kee, or rather Janetta’s infatuation with him. ‘He was handsome and charming and angry,’ Nicky remembered. ‘My mother loved him, though he wanted to kill me.’
Halfway through her third year Nicky was despatched to a children’s home ‘for my own protection’. She returned to a domestic life in which, as she put it, ‘Robert and my mother continued wanting to be rid of me.’ According to Janetta, the move was allowable ‘because Robert no longer seemed so resentful of her existence’. Solace lay at Ham Spray
, a permanent refuge and place of safety always remembered for its flower-filled gardens and its communal meals, being read to by Frances or collected at the station by Ralph in his car. If the house was haunted by the ghosts of old Bloomsbury – from an early stage Nicky knew that there had been a violent death on the premises, though she did not yet associate it with Carrington – then the Bloomsbury artefacts that lay around the place could be oddly consoling: ‘At Ham Spray at breakfast time – quiet and a little tense – usually just me, Ralph with his pink Financial Times and Frances with her letters – I’d look at Carrington’s painting of the mill at Tidemarsh – green water reflecting the sky. I’d hold that image in my head and body. If things were hard I’d remember a print of a waterfall in the passage upstairs.’
Undeniably, things were hard for a small child whose mother found it difficult to show affection and whose prospective stepfather seems barely to have tolerated her presence in the house. Seventy years later, Nicky could still remember the terror of being shaken by Kee when he was in one of his fits of temper. Bringing Up Children contains a photograph of an infant being suckled at the breast. ‘The love and affection a baby enjoys from being held in our arms is as important as the food he takes,’ runs the caption. In the memoir she wrote of her early life, Nicky recalled her mother remarking of her father, ‘in a hopeless tone of voice’, ‘I simply couldn’t bear to touch him – too awful’, adding the gloss ‘And I don’t remember my mother touching me.’ Plenty of evidence exists of Janetta’s deep-rooted affection for her children, but the fact remains that her absorption with the men in her life was such that domestic responsibility invariably came off worse. Nicky remembered, as a small child, being left alone at Sussex Place and other locations while her mother disappeared to assignations and parties. Several years later, when Nicky’s situation was repeated with a second child and another man, even so loyal a supporter of Janetta’s interests as Frances Partridge could be found noting that ‘It is clear from her letters that Janetta is missing her children badly, but she has made no mention of their missing her.’