by D. J. Taylor
While most of A Room in Chelsea Square’s carefully contrived plotlines come to nothing – the magazine never takes shape, Ronnie ends up supervising the Gladiator’s women’s page, Nicholas is thrown over by Patrick in favour of a good-looking shop assistant – then there is a dreadful fascination about the relationship between Ronnie and his highly attractive girlfriend, ‘Lily’. Patronised and dominated by him (‘Ronnie’s slave girl’, according to Patrick), lined up to act as his secretary when the magazine launches, Lily is thought to be ‘much too beautiful for that slug Gras’. Nicholas’s friend Michael wonders, ‘How has someone as hideous as Ronnie managed to get hold of someone so beautiful?’ There is a ghastly evening chez Gras which begins with Lily bounding out of the drawing room at Ronnie’s call and executing drinks orders at his direction. Michael, offering to lend a hand in the kitchen, is told that Ronnie wouldn’t approve. As well as officiating as secretary, Lily has also been recommended for the magazine’s business side, as Ronnie imagines that her salary can be put towards his household expenses. According to Patrick, an amused spectator, ‘I’m sure Michael’s just the boy to lick the stamps which Lily is going to put on all those letters you’re going to write.’ Ronnie’s final words after dinner are a condescending: ‘You can lock up now, Lily. I shall go and work in the study. You needn’t wait up for me. Breakfast about eleven, I think.’
The suspicion that on his journeys around Lansdowne Terrace, Nelson saw scenes like this being enacted is enhanced by an exquisitely awful moment in which Ronnie wakes up to find that Lily has placed a bunch of grapes by his bedside. Asked if she would hold them for him (‘I find it so tiring to the arm’), Lily dangles them before his open mouth and then wipes his face with a napkin. At bath-time Lily wonders: would he like to play with his boats today? ‘Of course. But you’re not to refer to my tummy as a sandbank.’ Underlying this badinage lurks the thought that Lily’s personality has been squashed flat by Ronnie’s treatment. When Michael contrives to sleep with her, in Patrick’s flat, the experience is a sad disappointment. ‘It had been like going to bed with a corpse. Every ounce of vitality must have been squeezed out of her long ago by Ronnie.’ Lily’s confession of her infidelity produces an even ghastlier exchange:
‘You don’t want to leave me?’
‘Oh, no, Ronnie.’
‘Then you’d better go and see about lunch. I don’t know whether I shall be able to eat much. You’ve probably ruined my digestion. You’d better concoct some particularly light and appetizing dishes.’
By the time that Horizon limped to a close at the end of 1949, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford had been swapping jokes about Connolly and his entourage for nearly half a decade. ‘Smarty-Smarty’; ‘Smarty’s Own Mag’; ‘Mrs Bluefeet’; ‘Mrs Barefoot’: no letter exchanged between Nancy’s Parisian eyrie and Waugh’s Gloucestershire fastness seems to have been complete without its teasing reference to the cultural panjandrum of Bedford Square. It was not that the teasing came to a halt in the post-war era, rather that it had a different focus and was recalibrated to include fictional re-castings of Connolly as well as straightforward mockery. The most obvious aspect of the novels that Waugh and Mitford published in the decades after the war which relate in some way to Horizon is their sense of complicity, the thought that both writers are working from a store of allusions and jokes laid down years before, picking up batons that will be handed on again further along the track.
And so Nancy’s The Blessing (1951) – dedicated to Waugh – seems to carry on where her letters left off. Grace, its heroine, has two suitors, one of them an Old Etonian theatrical impresario named ‘Ed Spain’. Known to his friends as ‘the Captain’ or ‘the Old Salt’, Spain is described as a ‘charming, lazy character’, keen on his food and French wines, whose ambition is to make enough money to lead ‘the life for which nature had suited him, that of a rich dilettante’. There is also a punning joke about his keen blue eyes, which ‘looked as if they had been concentrated for many years on a vanishing horizon’. As a taste-maker and highly rated intellectual presence, he has accumulated a band of acolytes, ‘clever young women all more or less connected and more or less in love with the Captain’. Spain calls them ‘My Crew’ and leaves the management of his theatre increasingly in their hands, ‘a perfect arrangement for such a lazy man’. The Crew have such hifalutin names as ‘Oenone’, ‘Ulra’, ‘Fiona’ and ‘Phaedra’ and inhabit the Captain’s rambling house on the river, where they do the housework, living in the attics and the cellar, ‘which no servant would have tolerated for a moment, but which the clever Captain had invested with romance’. The girls themselves are punctiliously described:
They looked very much alike, and might have been a large family of sisters; their faces were partially hidden behind curtains of dusty, blonde hair, features more or less obscured from view, and they were all dressed alike in duffle coats and short trousers, with bare feet, blue and rather large, connected to unnaturally thin ankles. Their demeanour was that of an extreme sulkiness, and indeed they looked as if they might be on the verge of mutiny. But this appearance was quite misleading, the Captain had them well in hand; they hopped to it at the merest glance from him, emptying ash-trays and bringing more bottles off the ice.
As for their political views, following Waugh’s earlier remarks about Connolly’s ‘Communist young ladies’, Mitford notes that they ‘could not be the clever girls they were without seeing life a little bit through Marxist spectacles’. Put to work on a communist play translated from ‘some Bratislavan dialect’, they sit about ‘in high-necked sweaters, shorts, and bare, blue feet, their heads bowed and their faces entirely obscured by the curtain of hair’.
In The Blessing, Connolly masquerades as a theatre manager. In Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender (1961), the final volume of his Sword of Honour trilogy, he reappears as ‘Everard Spruce’, who conducts a magazine named Survival, funded by the Ministry of Information, and lives ‘in a fine house in Cheyne Walk, cared for by secretaries to the number of four’. Spruce, who wears Charvet shirts and a bow tie, is said to display ‘the negligent elegance of a fashionable don’. The significance of Waugh’s portrait of Spruce and his entourage lies in its deliberate echoes of Mitford’s sketch. A visitor to his house remarks on the bohemian get-up of the girls.
The secretaries were dressed rather like him though in commoner materials; they wore their hair long and enveloping in a style which fifteen years later was to be associated with the King’s Road. One went bare-footed as though to emphasize her servile condition. They were sometimes spoken of as ‘Spruce’s veiled ladies.’ They gave him their full devotion; also their rations of butter, meat and sugar.
The secretaries have names such as ‘Frankie’ and ‘Coney’. Frankie, the bare-footed one, offers a cocktail made of South African sherry and ‘Olde Falstaffe Gin’ and tells one of the guests that it is a relief to meet ‘a real writer instead of all these smarties Everard wastes his time on’. The Survival office (‘a smaller room austerely, even meanly furnished’) adjoins Spruce’s drawing room. Here, when not engaged on domestic tasks, ‘the four secretaries stoked the cultural beacon which blazed from Iceland to Adelaide; here the girl who could type answered Spruce’s numerous “fan letters” and the girl who could spell corrected proofs’.
Naturally, some of the situational details are exaggerated – at no time were Lys, Sonia and Janetta all working and living together under the same roof – but there seems little doubt that Waugh and Mitford were using them as models. That Waugh, who owed Connolly many a professional debt, felt guilty about this cannibalising process is clear from a letter he wrote him shortly after Unconditional Surrender was published. Here Waugh professes himself ‘greatly annoyed’ to see that reviewers have attempted to identify Horizon with Survival.
That magazine was the creation of the Ministry of Information. Horizon, of course, was Watson’s benefaction. It is true that you had a semi-literate socialist colleague, but he was not ‘Spruce
’; still less you. As for the secretaries, Lys was beautifully neat and, as I remember her, Miss Brownell was quite presentable. Some time later you had a bare footed landlady but (surely?) she had no part in Horizon and very little part in the delightful parties you gave. The whole identification is a fantasy.
Waugh’s defence would have seemed much less disingenuous had he and Mitford not spent long years exchanging injurious gossip about Connolly framed in exactly the same language as their novels. Meanwhile, Sword of Honour harbours another Lost Girl, whose career Waugh follows in some detail. This is Guy Crouchback’s first wife Virginia Troy, a once stylish ornament of the beau monde, who, by the time the insinuating Lieutenant Trimmer comes across her in a Glasgow hotel in the early part of the war, is badly on her uppers. Trimmer is aware of a woman in her early thirties, dressed in clothes that two years ago had come from a grand couturier, ‘with all the requisites for attention, who was not trying to attract’. Virginia’s latest man, she explains, has just disappeared: ‘He’s a sailor. I haven’t known him long but I liked him. He went off quite suddenly. People are always going off suddenly nowadays, not saying where.’
How has Virginia come to be the person she is? Like Barbara, she turns out to have been seduced by a friend of her father’s, ‘who had looked her up, looked her over, taken her out, taken her in, from her finishing school in Paris’. There follows marriage to Guy, a second marriage to his replacement, Tommy Blackhouse, and then a succession of sugar daddies: ‘London hotels, fast cars, regimental point-to-points, the looming horror of an Indian cantonment; fat Augustus with his cheque-book always handy; Mr Troy and his taste for “significant people . . .”’ Only the here and now has meaning: ‘It was the present moment and the next five minutes which counted with Virginia.’ Later passages dwell on her feeling of isolation, the younger brother with whom she ‘never got on’, now dead in the war, a stepmother (‘She never approved of me and I can’t get at her now’) living in Switzerland. It is said of her that ‘Whatever the disturbances she had caused to others, her own place in her small but richly diverse world had been one of coolness, light and peace.’ From the day of her marriage to Guy and desertion of Mr Troy until her meeting with Trimmer, ‘she had achieved a douceur de vivre that was alien to her epoch; seeking nothing, accepting what came and enjoying it without compunction’. Significantly, when she dies in a doodlebug blast, it is left to Spruce to pay tribute to a life in which half-a-dozen real Lost Girl lives seem to have been gathered up: Virginia, he tells Frankie and Coney, ‘was the last of twenty years’ succession of heroines. The ghosts of romance who walked between the two wars.’
Waugh, Mitford and Nelson were using the Lost Girls as ammunition in their satirical war against Connolly, useful evidence in a campaign to expose what they regarded as his bogus side, his vanity, self-absorption and ability to surround himself with impressionable acolytes who lacked sufficient cultural knowledge to stop themselves from a wholesale swallowing of the Connolly myth. But there were other novels of the period in which the Lost Girl takes centre stage, ceases to be a satirical instrument and becomes something more enduring – a behavioural enigma, a psychological puzzle for the author to fret over, particularly if, as occasionally happened, the author had his own emotional scars to display.
Getting wind of Patrick Balfour’s plan to write about his failed marriage, Waugh was unimpressed. ‘He is trying to write a novel about Angela,’ he informed Nancy early in 1948. ‘It won’t be any good.’ Reporting back on the finished product early in 1950, he was slightly, but only slightly, more emollient. ‘Poor Patrick has written a novel in praise of Angela. Quite good about her but the rest Forsyte Saga.’ The real significance of The Ruthless Innocent (1949), it might be argued, lies in its back-dating. Rather than giving it a contemporary setting, Balfour emphasises his heroine’s spiritual attachment to the pleasure-seeking world of the Bright Young People by placing most of the action in the period 1928–31. Like the Balfours, the Heriots are aristocratic Lowland Scots, their family prestige assured by a tyrannical grandfather. Martin, his grandson, a painter-aesthete in line to inherit the barony after his older brother’s death in the Great War, has an entrée into smart bohemia by way of his interior-decorating chum ‘Ozzie’. It is in Ozzie’s Bruton Street shop that he first sets eyes on Angela’s alter-ego, ‘Sally’.
Several passages dwell on Sally’s guilelessness, her apparent naivety, her stunning good looks (‘Her eyes glowed with pleasure. They were large and deep and blue’), her love of such sensual diversions as lying in the sun, and her complete inability to resist an emotional impulse. Her childlike qualities are repeatedly emphasised: she is said to have a child’s head on a woman’s body, to talk without expression – ‘it was a child’s voice which has not yet developed its tone’. This air of sexy infantilism is enhanced by her ingenuous vocal style. ‘It’s nice and cuddly,’ she observes of her white fleece coat. ‘I call it my little lambkin.’ Sally’s early life is as rootless as her current existence and includes an unknown father, an actress mother who abandons her in childhood and a fleeting career on the stage. After coming across her at a country weekend, where, in the approved Bright Young Person manner, she has stationed herself ‘under an apple-tree on the brink of the lawn, dressed as an Austrian peasant girl’, Martin has no trouble in pressing his suit. ‘What lovely things do happen!’ Sally remarks before consenting to come and live with him in Cheyne Walk.
Simultaneously, there are family pressures at work, in the shape of Martin’s parliamentary father and his stockbroking Uncle Kenneth. Sally, we swiftly infer, is not just a glamorous halfwit but a symbol of inter-generational tension. Like many a mid-century novel by an erstwhile Bright Young Man, The Ruthless Innocent soon declares itself as a battle between the old world and the new, between duty, heritage and the family fortune, and love, living for the moment and pleasing yourself. But Martin, however besotted by his girlfriend, drawing and painting her endlessly in the studio at Cheyne Walk (‘The child’s head on the woman’s body, the cloudless face with its intent, still eyes, continued to fascinate him’), is ever more conscious of Sally’s lack of emotional ballast. The story of their romance, consequently, is largely the story of his efforts to work out what is going on in her head. After carefully logging her relish for film magazines, her fixation on a succession of actresses whose looks she aims to replicate, her susceptibility to passing whims – learning the guitar, getting a dog – he concludes that she is a ‘nomad’ for whom none of the conventional rules in life apply, for whom stray impulses and fleeting attractions will always mean more than long-term plans.
One senses that Martin, like his long-suffering creator, is deeply bewildered by Sally/Angela, cannot understand why she behaves as she does or clings so desperately to a life without strings at a time when, with family money lost in the 1929 crash and Uncle Kenneth’s firm enmired in scandal, his own existence is increasingly subject to upset. There is a rather ominous moment when, after their marriage and the birth of a son, Sally laments the number of relations the child will acquire: ‘I’m beginning to think that relations are rather nice to have, if they’re dead or you don’t have to see them.’ Martin demurs. For a short time the idyll continues in a Cap Ferrat villa owned by Ozzie’s rich American friend Mrs Sprint. But once again the tocsin of familial obligation is clanging in the shape of Martin’s Aunt Susan, who lives in the hills nearby, and a discussion as to whether the newly married couple should join her. Vagrant spirit Sally fears being tied down (‘It’s nice to be able to go away and know you’ll never come back’) and, when told that you can’t always be on the move, counters with the claim that ‘It’s exciting not to know at all where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing this time next year.’ Then, when Susan falls ill and Martin is summoned to her bedside, Sally allows herself to be squired off to Venice by his Uncle Geoffrey. ‘Darling, darling M,’ runs the letter conveying this unexpected news, ‘I have had to go with Geoffrey. I tried very hard but simply could
n’t help it . . . when something like this happens to one there’s nothing else to be done, I couldn’t not go with him.’
Martin’s sense of bafflement is brought to boiling point by a final meeting in Paris, where – Uncle Geoffrey having been quickly thrown over – Sally arrives in the company of an Italian admirer named Giovanni. Her explanation – if explanation it is – echoes the relevant passages in Angela’s memoirs, a hankering for excitement coexisting with a wish to carry on with existing arrangements: ‘I feel as if I don’t want a safe sort of life all the time, like before. But I feel just the same about you as I always did.’ When Martin, not unreasonably, objects that ‘Sally, you must know. Being unfaithful’s not just something that happens to you, like having measles. It’s something you decide to do or decide not to do.’ Like Angela, Sally instantly returns to her default position: the ungovernable impulse, impossible to resist, in whose grip she is simply swept up and borne unhesitatingly away: ‘With Geoffrey, it just seemed to happen.’
If Sally/Angela is simply unfathomable, a kind of elfin sprite wandering a lost pre-war world and mostly unaware of the havoc she causes, then the Lost Girl psychology on display in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time has an altogether different focus. For Pamela Flitton, first glimpsed in The Military Philosophers (1968), then found contemptuously making hay of the Labour MP Kenneth Widmerpool in Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), and finally coming to the immensely sticky end that Barbara had predicted for her in Temporary Kings (1973), is not a romantic figure but a modern version of one of the Furies – brusque, vengeful and utterly uncompromising, keen on male company but determined to cause as much pain as possible. ‘Giving men hell is what Miss Flitton likes,’ someone shrewdly diagnoses early on in her career. A wartime boyfriend maintains that ‘She’s cross all the time. Bloody cross. Thrives on it. Her chief charm. Makes her wonderful in bed. That is, if you like tension.’ The air of icy deliberation that she carries around with her, together with her casual attitude to sex, is confirmed by a character named Bob Duport: ‘I only stuffed her once. Against a shed in the back parts of Cairo airport, but even then I could see she might drive you round the bend, if she really decided to.’