by D. J. Taylor
Given that Books Do Furnish a Room contains at least two men who are driven to distraction by Pamela’s goings-on, this strikes a prophetic note. In one of the journals written in his old age, Powell notes Barbara’s conviction that she ‘is’ Pamela, but the life into art projections of his novels are rarely straightforward. It is not that Pamela is an unvarnished portrait of Barbara; rather, that Powell mingles some of Barbara’s characteristics and incidents from her life with a fair amount of invented material to produce something which, though hugely exotic, contains enough traces of the original to alert the reader to its grounding in some kind of lived existence. There is, for example, no physical resemblance. (Pamela is described as ‘one of those girls with a dead white complexion and black hair’.) Neither does Pamela pursue any of Barbara’s employments. When first glimpsed by Dance’s narrator Nick Jenkins in The Military Philosophers, she is an ATS driver. Although, like Barbara, she is transferred to Cairo, she ends up working for ‘a secret service outfit’. Simultaneously come hints that Pamela’s capacity for causing trouble is of far higher order than the dawdling siren turning up late every day at the offices of the Yugoslav government in exile. After being mixed up in ‘a rather delicate situation’ with some Free Poles, then withdrawn from driving duties after her car goes missing, her conquests include ‘two RAF officers . . . court-martialled as a consequence of a fight about which was to drive her home after a party’, a Lieutenant Commander given ‘a severe reprimand’ and a Treasury official who gives her a lift in his car at Richmond Station, thereby ‘starting a trail of indiscretions that led to his transference to a less distinguished ministry’.
There is even a hint that her powers may be practically diabolic. When the clairvoyant Mrs Erdleigh tells her fortune one night, as the displaced residents of a block of flats gather in a basement while bombs fall overhead, even this practised overseer of female destiny is shocked: ‘You must be careful, my dear . . . There are things here that surprise even me.’ On the other hand, another of Pamela’s distinctive features – her complete indifference to the age and status of the men she decides to fascinate – brings her closer to the early 1940s version of a Barbara who once declared that her male ideal was the thickset actor Erich von Stroheim. She is, Nick tells us, ‘just as happy deranging the modest home life of a middle-aged air-raid warden, as compromising the commission of a rich and handsome guards ensign recently left school’. Then there is the matter of her procedural attack, ‘the unvarying technique of silence, followed by violence, with which she persecuted her lovers’. Like Barbara, she has an infallible trick of sniffing out male weakness, picking a significant other’s vulnerable spot and twisting the knife. ‘You don’t think I’m going to take orders from a heel like you?’ she tells Odo Stevens, her escort on the night when Mrs Erdleigh examines her palm. ‘You’re pathetic as a lover. No good at all. You ought to see a doctor.’
What does Pamela want? An obvious answer would be power: the power to ensnare and humiliate, revenge herself on men who have failed to match her exacting standards, a category in which all members of the male sex can be thought to repose. Even if what Jenkins calls her ‘iciness of manner’ is a constant, then, as he acknowledges, ‘there was no denying she was a striking girl to look at. Many men would find this cosmic rage with life, as it seemed to be, an added attraction.’ Even the normally prudent Widmerpool, when despatched to Cairo on War Office business, is no match for her wiles: ‘He managed to make a fool of himself about some girl . . . She was absolutely notorious.’ Transferred – as Widmerpool’s wife – to the snowbound English winter of 1946–7, the setting for Books Do Furnish a Room, Pamela shows an unexpected side. Her first appearance, escorted by her hapless husband, is at Thrubworth, where members of the family of Nick’s wife Isobel have gathered for the funeral of her brother Erridge. But the obsequies are only a secondary consideration to the much more pressing problem of what makes Pamela tick.
Observing her at close quarters for the first time, and struck as ever by the ‘pent-up sullen beauty’, Nick tries to establish what marks Pamela out as more than just a beautiful girl. Perhaps, he muses, it lies in ‘her absolute self-confidence, her manner of expressing without words that to be present at all was a condescension’. There is a revealing scene in which, feeling ill during the service and retiring to the house, she chatters tersely to Nick: ‘Are Kenneth and those other sods on their way here? The Kraut got me some tea.’ Nick looks on as Siegfried, the German prisoner of war employed at Thrubworth, and the deceased’s Uncle Alfred stand staring at her, ‘expressing in their individual and contrasted ways boundless silent admiration. Her contempt for both of them was absolute. It seemed only to stimulate more fervent worship.’
There is a final pièce de résistance when, taking ill again on her way out of the house, Pamela is violently sick into an antique Chinese vase. Is she pregnant, somebody wonders. Nick decides not: ‘I think it was just rage.’ Much of the novel, established in the literary London of the immediate post-war era, takes in the founding of a literary magazine called Fission – much more left-wing and ‘committed’ than Horizon – and it is here that Pamela comes into her own, extending her reputation for extreme bad behaviour yet revealing some hitherto unsuspected artistic interests. Again, Powell can be found elaborating the scope of a landscape he had observed at close hand in the late 1940s for the purposes of fiction. One of Fission’s contributors is the writer ‘X. Trapnel’, transparently a version of the dandy-novelist Julian Maclaren-Ross, who was one of Connolly’s early discoveries. The particular object of Maclaren-Ross’s desire among the Horizon staff was Sonia, so much so that Maclaren-Ross was eventually banned from the office. Here, Trapnel confesses to Nick that he is in love with Pamela: ‘I’m mad about her. I’d do anything to see her again.’ Arriving at the Widmerpools’ flat one night, Nick discovers that Trapnel and Pamela have eloped together.
Again, Nick struggles to understand Pamela’s motivation. Why has she gone off with the deeply unreliable and narcissistic Trapnel? Why, if it comes to that, did she marry the vainglorious and self-obsessed Widmerpool? The only explanation he can find – practically cosmic in its implications – is that ‘She had done it, so to speak, in order to run away with Trapnel’. These ‘two unique specimens’ – husband and lover – ‘as it were brought into collision, promised anarchic extremities of feeling of the kind at which she aimed, in which she was principally at home.’ All this, naturally, returns us to Barbara and her dealings with Quennell: ‘I like things to be difficult.’ But Pamela, we soon discover, regards her relationship with Trapnel as far more than a means of taunting her husband. Holed up with her paramour in a dingy flat in Maida Vale, she takes a keen but critical interest in his work-in-progress, a novel entitled Profiles in String, informing Nick, who chances upon them there, that she is ‘not satisfied’ with its merits. Neither, it turns out, is she satisfied with Trapnel. Coming back along the towpath of the Regent’s Park Canal from the pub in which Trapnel reveals that she has abandoned him, Nick and his friend Bagshaw stumble upon the evidence of her parting shot: the pages of Profiles in String floating in the water.
Powell is not quite done with Pamela. In Temporary Kings, still married to Widmerpool and still giving off that ‘instant warning of general hostility to all comers that her personality automatically projected’, she turns up at a cultural conference in Venice in the company of an American publisher named Louis Glober. By now the aura of notoriety that envelops her has darkened to include necrophile involvement in the death of a French intellectual named Ferrand-Seneschal (‘the implication is that she was in bed with this Frenchman after he was dead’); her own death, in equally doubtful circumstances, is not far off. By this stage Pamela has lost her grounding in Barbara’s comparatively modest exploits of the 1940s and become something not far short of a figure in classical mythology, a kind of elemental force, malign and unappeasable, beholden to no one but herself.
If Barbara’s appearance in A Danc
e to the Music of Time involves the application of almost infinite layers of malevolence, not to mention some coruscating special effects, then Sonia’s part seems much closer to her real life function at Horizon. In Books Do Furnish a Room, she can be identified as ‘Ada Leintwardine’, a doctor’s daughter said to be ‘keen on making a career in . . . the world of letters’, and employed as secretary to Sillery, the elderly and intrigue-ridden Oxford don. Ada, as Nick describes her, is ‘in her twenties, fair, with a high colour, a shade on the plump side, though only enough to suggest changes in the female figure then pending’. Capable, industrious, with a faintly bossy side, Ada moves on to work at Quiggin & Craggs, the publishers of Fission, where she rapidly wins golden opinions. As Bagshaw remarks, echoing what was said about Sonia in Horizon’s last years, ‘Ada’s the king-pin of the whole organisation. Maybe I should say queen bee. She provides an oasis of good looks in the office, and a few contacts with writers not sunk in middle age.’ But while Ada is only a minor attendant on Dance’s thronged and constantly evolving cast, there is another novel – possibly the most famous work ever produced by one of Connolly’s satellites – in which Sonia is always supposed to play a starring role. This is Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published a bare four months before she became the second Mrs Orwell in October 1949.
To Hilary Spurling, her biographer, Sonia is transparently ‘Julia’, the ‘girl from the fiction department’, who spends her working hours in a government office helping to produce pornography for impressionable proles and her leisure hours conducting a doomed affair with Winston Smith. Anxious to begin on the novel’s second draft after a hard winter’s journalism, Orwell, according to Spurling, returned to Jura in the spring of 1947 with the aim of ‘recreating’ Sonia as Julia and a determination to ‘take her as his model’. Certainly, Sonia would have been in Orwell’s mind at the time he resumed work on Nineteen Eighty-Four: why else would he have invited her to visit him? Watching her enter the room in which the two-minute hate is being staged, Winston sees
a bold-looking girl of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
In fact, Julia’s age is later given as twenty-six (Sonia, by the time that Orwell invited her to Jura, was twenty-eight). Much is made of the contrast between her youthful zest and Winston’s advancing decrepitude: ‘I’m thirty-nine years old. I’ve got a wife that I can’t get rid of. I’ve got varicose veins. I’ve got five false teeth.’ Orwell, at the time he first asked Sonia to marry him, would have been forty-three. Later on, Winston notes that ‘Except for her mouth, you could not have called her beautiful.’ Like Sonia, she has a forceful demeanour, is said to ‘burst’ into rooms, and has a briskly assertive vocal style that stops only just short of bossiness: ‘I do voluntary work three days a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I’ve spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one end of the banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything.’ Unlike Sonia, she is resolutely unintellectual, ‘didn’t care much for reading’ and falls asleep while being entertained with selections from Emmanuel Goldstein’s critique of the Oceanian regime, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
There are circumstantial factors, too, which might call this identification into question. One is that Orwell had started thinking about Nineteen Eighty-Four well before his re-encounter with Sonia in 1946. Another is that he had asked several other women to marry him at this time: it might equally be the memory of Anne Popham or Celia Paget that he carried back with him to Jura. A third is that, with the exception of Winston’s opening remarks and one or two speculations about Julia’s interior life (‘She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life . . . She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated . . . She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead’), we learn very little about her, how she operates as a human being and what goes on in her mind. However attractive to ageing, moth-eaten Winston, there is a way in which she is more important for what she symbolises – youth, rebellion, free-spiritedness – than for what she actually is.
To Spurling, Sonia is not merely a physical presence in Nineteen Eighty-Four; she is also a decisive influence on its intellectual framework. In July 1946, for example, she wrote a long Horizon review of Les amitiés particulières, a novel by the French writer Roger Peyrefitte which turns on the friendship between two boys at a Catholic boarding school. The book reawakened all Sonia’s hostile memories of her own upbringing, and the strategies of treachery, betrayal and what Orwell would have called ‘doublethink’ that she imagined to lie at Catholicism’s heart:
When you have seen through [this] world you can never become its victim, but can fight it with the only unanswerable weapon – cynical despair; when you have learned the lesson of the double vision, action and emotion are equally meaningless. This is the heritage of Catholic education . . . one which those who went to Catholic schools always recognize in each other, members of a secret society who, when they meet, huddle together, temporarily at truce with the rest of the world, while they cautiously, untrustingly, lick each other’s wound.
While there is no proof that Orwell ever read the issue of Horizon in which this appeared, Spurling thinks it ‘hard to write off as coincidence the fact that, at the very moment when he started work on Nineteen Eighty-Four, his ex-mistress outlined in print precisely the scenario that would become the central section of his plot’.
Certainly, Nineteen Eighty-Four was properly begun no more than a month after these lines were written (Orwell told his friend George Woodcock in August 1946 that he had ‘just started’ another novel). And certainly, whether Orwell read it or not, there is a clear connection between the ‘double vision’ and ‘doublethink’. On the other hand, a trawl through the journalism Orwell was writing in the period 1944–6 suggests that the possibility of a link between the Christian Church and secular dictatorships had been exercising his imagination for at least two years. One might note his unpublished review of Harold Laski’s Faith, Reason and Civilisation, written for the Manchester Evening News in March 1944 but rejected, or so Orwell assumed, for its ‘anti-Stalin implications’. Laski’s book is an attempt to square his belief in democracy and freedom of thought with his conviction that the highly authoritarian Soviet Union is ‘the real dynamo of the Socialist movement in this country and everywhere else’. According to Orwell, Laski does this by drawing an analogy between the USSR and Christianity in the period of the break-up of the Roman Empire; Soviet socialism ‘aims at the establishment of human brotherhood and equality just as single-mindedly as the early church aimed at the establishment of the Kingdom of God’.
In the end, Orwell rejects Laski’s analogy as false, but there are several other meditations of this kind in the journalism he produced towards the end of the Second World War, and his attempts to equate religious faith with left- and right-wing forms of autocracy go at least as far back as 1938. Meanwhile, there is another reason for wondering if, in the end, the girl in the fiction department is the girl in the Horizon office. O’Brien, the member of the Inner Party whom Winston believes to be his saviour, is ultimately revealed as an agent provocateur; Winston’s rebellion against Big Brother is a put-up job; there is at least a suspicion that Julia is O’Brien’s willing accomplice, primed to entice Winston into a net of subterfuge whose eventual consequence will be his re-education at the hands of the Thought Police. If Nineteen Eighty-Four is a love letter from Jura to a girl left behind in London, then one of its overriding messages is that in the end the people we love will betray us.
Interlude: Barbara’s Style
Dear Tony,
Thank you very much for taking the tr
ouble to write and say you enjoyed the book. I read your letter just after running into Peter Quennell on the train, who was so depressingly evasive and po-faced that I anticipated nothing but further scathing and shocked reactions, and was very consoled and pleased indeed by your enthusiasm.
Barbara to Anthony Powell, shortly after publication of A Young Girl’s Touch
Barbara published five books in her lifetime: A Young Girl’s Touch (1956); a volume of short stories primed by her experiences in America entitled Born Losers (1965); and two volumes of memoirs, Tears Before Bedtime (1987) and Weep No More (1989). A second novel, A Love Match (1969) perished at the hands of the libel lawyers – the litigants were her old supporter John Sutro and his wife Gillian – and was eventually withdrawn from sale. Literary friends occasionally complained that her efforts were marked by laziness, that age-old amateur reluctance to do justice to promising material. ‘As with so many female writers with a touch of talent, she will not take sufficient pains’, Anthony Powell rather testily pronounced. On the other hand, it could be argued that this tendency to throw the words down any old how is what gives her writing its kick, the breezy impressionism of the style made all the more compelling by the hint of darker things beneath. In A Young Girl’s Touch, Melinda takes a train to Teddington, where she eavesdrops on a pair of fellow travellers loudly conversing across the carriage: