The Lost Girls

by D. J. Taylor

  That Robert Kee, with his volcanic temperament and his four years in a German POW camp, was as psychologically damaged as Janetta, with her fractured childhood and the bereavements of her early twenties, was no help to their dependants. As for their own prospects, a romantic idyll soon gave way to furious rows. In July 1946, for example, Frances recorded the ‘beautiful and charming’ couple bringing Nicky to stay at Ham Spray for the weekend. Deciding to walk to the top of the downs, Janetta and Robert came to a halt in a nearby field where they stood talking for an hour, and ‘something in the attitude of their drooping heads struck a chill into my heart’. Nicky, too, remembered endless disputatious circuits of the Partridges’ garden. ‘We should have been very happy’, Janetta wistfully recalled. Unfortunately, the ‘emotional rage’ that was tearing Kee to pieces had a similar effect on his other half. Self-contained, impulsive and at all times trailed by a stream of other admirers anxious to fill a vacated place, neither of them was the least put out by the temporary separations of which their life together consisted. Feliks Topolski, always susceptible to Janetta’s allure, remembered ringing her up on the spur of the moment at around this time. She arrived at his studio in Maida Vale shortly afterwards on a bicycle with a bulging rucksack, ‘having meant anyway to leave her man on that day’. There followed what Topolski called ‘a charming and calm seven days of courteous bed-sharing’. Forty years later he could still recall seeing her from a bus walking back to the studio ‘through the mean Edgware Road crowding, uniquely unaffected, blonde, undeniably my mate, very beautiful, very desirable’.

  There were other extra-curricular relationships of this kind. On a ‘paid holiday’ picking apples in the country, Janetta attached herself to a vacationing sailor, ‘more to prove to myself that somebody could still want to be with me than because I was in any way attracted to the young man’. If some of Janetta’s friends suspected that Nicky might be getting a raw deal out of her new domestic arrangements, then they were united in their admiration for Kee. Ralph was unstinting in his praise. Coming across him for the first time, the old Bloomsbury hand Clive Bell enthused that ‘It’s a long time since I met any male creature to whom I took a more immediate fancy.’ Finally, and to general satisfaction, their differences were patched up and a Register Office wedding arranged in London for 20 January 1948. Afterwards, the guests – Connolly, Angela Culme-Seymour and Diana Witherby among them – assembled to consume oysters, smoked salmon, chicken mayonnaise and champagne. Exalted by the varieties of food and drink on offer, the heat of the fire and the scent of mimosa, an uncharacteristically mellow Frances recorded that ‘the whole experience merged into one, and I was borne on the wings of semi-intoxication, combined with the sympathetic feelings I had been simmering in all day’.

  The newly married Kees were not the only couple on whom Frances Partridge’s shrewdly observant eye fell in 1948. A diary entry from the spring offers a neat little cameo of a visit to their neighbours Robin and Mary Campbell, where the Connollys were staying. Lys was ‘untiring in her wifely deference’, Frances noted, constantly flattering her other half with admiring references to ‘Clever people like Cyril’ or ‘Good talkers like Cyril’. But clever, talkative Cyril paid her little attention. The same characteristics were on display later in the year when the Campbells brought the Connollys over to Ham Spray. ‘Oh, that must have been wonderful Cyril,’ Lys would chirp, as Connolly gamely reminisced, or would proudly inform the assembled company, ‘Oh, do you know Cyril was remembered by the waiter at the Chapon Fin who hadn’t seen him for twenty years?’ Frances noted that Connolly ‘doesn’t snub’ Lys even when she tried to ‘produce’ him. On the other hand, none of this seemed to augur well for their life together.

  With and sometimes without Lys, Connolly had continued to avail himself of the new freedoms available to the post-war traveller. The long mock-honeymoon of 1946 was followed by an end-of-year trip to New York with Watson, ostensibly to gather material for an American Horizon special number booked for the autumn of 1947. (‘I am told he is now at work in America telling the Yanks of his sufferings’, Evelyn Waugh reported to Diana Cooper early in January, having previously assured Nancy Mitford that ‘S Boots Connolly has fled the country. Some say from his debts.’) When he travelled alone, or with his proprietor, letters from Lys followed him around the globe like homing pigeons, to tell him that he is much missed, that renewals circulars are about to go out to Horizon’s subscribers or that the dinner parties convened in his absence have been a great success (‘Orwell was quite gay!’). Predictably, a joint spring visit to Paris – where Nancy Mitford had taken up residence – produced a torrent of gossip and insinuation about ‘S Boots whom I met accompanied by Mrs Boots when walking through the Louvre on my way home’. Staying in England later in May, she reported that Connolly was ‘very touchy’ about Janetta (‘Love I expect’), before alleging that Lys had been sent home early ‘so that Connolly could entertain intellectuals on her £75’.

  ‘I see Cyril’s boom fading,’ her fellow-conspirator pronounced at Christmas 1947, ‘Horizon losing subscribers, income-tax officials pressing him, inertia, luxury and an insane longing to collect rare things.’ By this stage in Horizon’s seven-year history, the question of its probable future was being discussed well beyond Connolly’s immediate circle. It was not only Waugh and Mitford who wondered whether Connolly had shot his bolt. What was his attitude to the creation that had sustained him since the early days of the war? American Horizon, which appeared towards the end of September 1947, with contributions from Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens and John Berryman, had been well received in a post-war England untouched by any new-found luxuriance in the arts, but more than one critic alleged that none of its contents was in the same class as Connolly’s introduction. Certainly, Connolly was still prepared to fight his corner, to publish new writers who caught his talent-hungry eye and champion work that might not have been to every reader’s taste – the decision to devote an entire special number to Waugh’s The Loved One early in 1948 was brought off in the face of stiff opposition by an unimpressed Peter Watson. The arrival of the hundreth issue in April produced the usual volley of complimentary remarks and testimonies to his status as one of the great cultural paladins of the age, but Connolly was restless, ripe for diversion. The American publisher Cass Canfield, meeting him in New York the year before, reported back to Hamish Hamilton that their distinguished English visitor had said that he thought the job of editing a monthly magazine took up too much of his time.

  Clearly, the restlessness was as much domestic as professional. But the early part of 1948 brought several indications of quite how much Connolly relied on Lys and quite how indefatigably she managed his affairs. In January, alarmed by his listlessness and chronic exhaustion – a whole vista of vague but disturbing symptoms that at one point included blurred vision – she installed him in a health farm at Tring. Solicitous letters quickly followed. ‘I miss you so much and am wretched to think of what you are going through. The first week is probably the worst. After that you will probably slide into a dull routine and time will go more quickly,’ Lys reassured him. Alert to the comic potential of Connolly’s infirmity (‘Cyril has had an apoplectic seizure & gone to take the waters. The bare footed partisans have got his dining room’) and keen to profit from its possible aftermath (‘If he had another seizure it is really all up with him. I wish I could get Lys as a cook’), Waugh and Mitford were also seriously alarmed about his health. ‘Awful about Smarty’s stroke’, Nancy wrote from Paris early in February, adding that ‘at luncheon Lysey disclosed that Cyril had one in a train . . . But as a lover of Smarty I feel sad about him, I thought he seemed wretched the night I dined alone with him.’ Whether or not he had had either a stroke or, as Waugh suspected, a heart attack, the Connolly who lay sequestered at Tring, slowly recovering his strength and steadily losing weight – he shed 25 lbs in the course of his stay – knew who to thank for his redemption. ‘But for you I would have no eyes and no t
eeth’, he fervently, if melodramatically, assured Lys.

  Another mark of her practical, problem-solving side emerged in the spring when London County Council decided that it wanted the flat at Lansdowne Terrace for new housing, effectively leaving Horizon homeless. It was Lys who secured the two elegant rooms at 53 Bedford Square, which became the magazine’s final resting place. However genuine Connolly’s gratitude for this piece of resourcefulness, there were signs that the relationship was coming to an end. Twice Watson found her in tears at the Horizon office. Sonia, always matter-of-fact about her friends’ emotional setbacks, reported that she was ‘more like a sad and bedraggled sparrow than ever, keeping up an unceasing chirping about “true love” while contemplating the ringless finger – and there’s NOTHING one can do about it’. There was an intensely sad and symbolic episode in which Lys bought herself a small ring, showed it to Janetta and then betrayed the depths of her emotional hurt by exclaiming, ‘This is all I’ve got and I’ve had to buy it myself.’

  The catalyst for the events of the next six months was Dick Wyndham, for so long Connolly’s host at Tickerage, killed in May 1948 while exercising his talent as a professional photographer by covering the fighting in the newly created Jewish state for the Sunday Times. At his funeral Connolly was introduced to yet another of the very young women who continued to wreak such havoc on his emotional life. Eighteen years old, immensely pretty and at this point being courted by Lucian Freud, Anne Dunn had approximately the same effect on the middle-aged editor as Janetta had produced almost a decade before. The first seeds of his infatuation were sown as Connolly set about planning a new and unrepentantly extramural project – a travel book, to be published in England by Hamish Hamilton and in America by Canfield, which would take him to the area around Bordeaux that, even in the pre-Jean days, he had always regarded as his spiritual home. In June he undertook a reconnaissance trip, returned to Paris to collect Lys and then headed south to the Villa Mauresque to stay with Somerset Maugham. Luxuriously entertained and gratifyingly deferred to, Connolly, as his letters home to Sonia make clear, was in his element. Maugham was a considerate and reassuring host (‘Willie is in excellent form & makes one feel that at seventy five one enjoys, if one is careful, rather more everything one likes at thirty five’), not averse to flattering his younger acolyte (‘I know what you are, Cyril, a BRIGAND’) and delighting him with the grandeur of his other guests (‘Great efforts to-day to get Lys to go to the hairdresser as the Windsors are dining here tomorrow’).

  With the Duke and Duchess disposed of, the Connollys moved on to stay with Lady Kenmare at Cap Ferrat. Subsequently Lys returned to London and the office, while Connolly repaired to Bordeaux and, it was anticipated, some serious work on his book. The original idea had been for Wyndham to supply the illustrations that Canfield and Hamilton required. In his absence, Connolly engaged Joan Rayner, who combined the advantage of being a talented photographer with the drawback of being one of Connolly’s old loves, after whom he continued intermittently to pine. Lys, assured that the new relationship was strictly professional, would not have been reassured by some of the letters Joan sent back to her current boyfriend, Patrick Leigh Fermor. ‘Cyril is being very sweet & easy & is heavenly to travel with’, ran an early note. Afterwards the atmosphere declined. ‘The only blot on this (& this, my darling, is for your ears alone) is that things are getting a bit tense’, Joan complained some weeks later. Why did these complications have to spoil things so often? she wondered. ‘I feel like a boringly monogamous bitch but I can’t do anything about it.’ As very often happened with Connolly’s amours, high emotion and low farce uneasily contended. At one point she agreed to take part in a mock-wedding in a cave, only for the proceedings to be interrupted by the arrival of a party of boy scouts and the rumble of falling rocks. By early autumn, bored with having to sustain the all-too demanding role of Connolly’s ‘lovely boy-girl . . . like a casual, loving, decadent Eton athlete’, she returned to Leigh Fermor.

  The Bordeaux trip offered a pattern demonstration of Connolly’s capacity for vacillation, his inability to accomplish a task or conduct his emotional life without wounding the people who were closest to him. There was no prospect of his French holiday leading to anything, but Joan’s presence encouraged him to embark on one of his regular exercises in compare and contrast, in which the tantalising ghosts of the past sprang up to contend with current obligations. As he explained to his mother, the trip with Joan ‘made me realise that I could not marry Lys at present because I should only be unkind to her – she is so devoted to me and belongs to all the every-day part of my life – but Joan is like Jean, a very intelligent and remarkable person in her own right . . . and the one person who could have got me over the Jean years earlier if we had had better luck’. Many of Joan’s letters to Leigh Fermor over the autumn refer to ‘the Humanist’, as they christened him, and his rekindled interest in her. There was a scheme for her to return to Bordeaux, but divining the real purpose of the offer she cried off. In these circumstances, even a trip to London was fraught with embarrassment. ‘I may stay at Sussex Place’, she told Leigh Fermor in October, adding that ‘it’s safer than anywhere since Lys is always there – but I don’t really want to if I can get anywhere else nice’.

  The travel book was quietly abandoned, leaving Canfield and Hamilton with an exorbitant expenses claim but nothing they could satisfactorily publish. Meanwhile, back at Sussex Place Lys’s already frail emotional state was further undermined by a visit from Brian Howard. It was by now the end of October 1948. Connolly was in Paris, irritating her with letters describing how much he was enjoying himself. What happened was set out in considerable detail in a letter to Sonia, framed in Howard’s inimitable high-camp style.

  ‘My dear, I have done the most incomparably foolish thing. And although it was not a deliberate piece of naughtiness on my part it must seem exactly as if it was.’ According to Howard, he happened to find himself in the vicinity of Sussex Place, ‘and as I really do like Lys, very much, I rang up, and asked if I could come round and see her’. Here, by his own admission, he made ‘a complete ass of myself. I said I couldn’t believe she really loved Cyril (such a silly, vulgar thing to say – and she does) and then I gaily said “And what’s all this I hear about Cyril and Joan?”’ It was meant to be a ‘jolly remark’, but Lys was devastated. Howard, swiftly enlightened by Peter Watson as to the true facts of the case (‘He tells me that Lys had no idea that Cyril and Joan were having a flirtation even. As a matter of fact I don’t even know whether they really are’), added a handwritten PS in his letter to Sonia with the information that a friend had just arrived to tell him that ‘Peter said you were furious + would never speak to me again . . . God knows I did NOT intend to hurt Lys. It was just my bloody tongue running away with me . . . Try not to think too badly of me. B.’

  Although Connolly and Lys would continue to live together for more than another year, this was effectively the end of their relationship. While Connolly went on throwing parties in the big house at Sussex Place, what he and his co-host said to each other once the guests had gone home can only be guessed at. Professionally and personally, nearly a decade’s worth of relative stability was drawing to a close. In January 1949 Watson went to New York for four months, but there was no suggestion that Connolly was holding the fort in his absence. He went less and less to Bedford Square, left most of the work to Lys and Sonia, and continued to haunt West End nightclubs in pursuit of Anne Dunn. At the same time, the long diminuendo of his relationship with Lys was accompanied by prodigious bouts of soul-searching, psychological back-tracking and peevish complaints. When Lys, deciding that she could stand the situation no more, disappeared to Florence he bombarded her with anguished letters, accused her of ‘playing about’ with his desertion complex and claimed that he could imagine her ‘casting me off like an old shoe and marrying a rich American or an Italian count’. To friends he continued to maintain a party line of unshakeable fealty. Shortly af
ter a solitary Whitsuntide stay at Piers Court, Evelyn Waugh reported to Nancy that ‘Smarty Boots has just left, having spent the weekend in torpor . . . Whenever Cyril woke up it was to tell me of his undying loyalty to, and devotion to, Lys.’

  There were others close to Connolly who were reaching the end of their tether. On the far side of the Atlantic, Watson was beginning to lose interest, not so much in Horizon but in the man who was supposed to be conducting it. ‘A rather terrible showdown with Cyril is about to happen,’ he told his lover, Waldemar Hansen. ‘Either the magazine will end in November or continue under very different auspices. He has behaved with shocking cynicism and it has upset me very much.’ Although there were one or two half-hearted negotiations with potential successors – Spender, John Lehmann and Alan Ross were all sounded out at one time or another – it was eventually decided that the magazine would close at the end of the year. Watson, reading the penultimate editorial, accused Connolly of compiling ‘the most dishonest series of reasons for stopping’. In this context there is something horribly disingenuous about Connolly’s famous and much-quoted foreword to the final number with its intimations of cultural drift, autumnal shadows falling over a once sunlit lawn: ‘it is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude and the quality of his despair’. If Connolly had been able to stir himself into action, then Horizon would have gone on.