by D. J. Taylor
‘My husband’s lost all his money in this war,’ said one of the women. ‘Nearly all,’ she added, flashing a square-cut diamond. ‘He’s really very hit. What with no supplies . . .’
‘My husband lost all his money in Austria before de war.’
‘This war . . . ?’
‘You know what it means, Gestapo? De English people have no idea what they’re like. If a Gestapo man he sees your coat and he likes . . . well.’
Comically pointed – note the contrast between the feigned deprivation of the woman with the square-cut diamond and the genuine predicament of the Austrian émigré stripped back to its bones – the dialogue also strikes an oddly sinister note: two middle-aged housewives chatting on a train, maybe, but with all the horrors of pre-war mitteleuropa welling up beneath the tracks. When the Austrian woman, staring from the window, declares that ‘I like life . . . In the morning there come de birds to pick up der crumbs. And the baker he comes with de bread. And look at de river. Lovely, isn’t so?’ the reader is likely to be pulled up short by the realisation that wartime London, with its ration cards and piled rubble, is a kind of Elysian field compared to Anschluss-era Vienna. Or there is her description of ‘Roger’ (possibly based on Quennell), one of Melinda’s countless boyfriends, reduced to silent anguish by her bad behaviour and refusal to turn up on time:
Roger had spent over an hour pacing the station. At first he had been very worried, but, after experiencing similar treatment on a previous occasion, he realized that she had wished to ditch him. He had been through a severe crisis and was beginning to feel the better for it. Convinced that he was thoroughly hardened and that nothing she did now could affect him, he soon repented of his decision. Pacing his father’s study Roger suffered conflicting emotions. In the course of the last ten years he had fallen for a number of girls but always at some point they were the infatuated ones and he it was who backed out.
Clearly Barbara had been reading Powell’s early novels, not to mention Nancy Mitford, whose deadpan tone she faithfully reproduces. The Mitford connection, in particular, is worth pursuing. Evelyn Waugh once wrote of Nancy that she belonged to the category of the mid-twentieth-century English writer ‘who can write but cannot think’. By this Waugh meant that his friend’s considerable intelligence was largely home-grown, denied the benefit of a proper education and to a certain degree instinctive. ‘She is purely idiosyncratic,’ he pronounced, ‘a survival of the time when it was thought feminine to be capricious.’ Growing up in the years before girls of upper-class families went to university, ‘her syntax is shaky. But her essential quality is that she can write.’ Much the same can be said of Barbara, whose astringent, high-visibility prose has exactly the same inconsistency that Waugh detected in the author of The Pursuit of Love but tends to redeem itself in sheer high spirits.
But there is something else boiling away in A Young Girl’s Touch, a stealthy undercurrent of irony, which simultaneously mocks the exasperated Roger with his ‘severe crisis’ and his conviction that he is ‘thoroughly hardened’ to Melinda’s wiles, while quietly sympathising with his inability to commit himself. ‘Squinting and puzzled, staring into the Empire mirror, heedless of his sticking out ears and dimples, he wondered why it was that he should be so obsessed by Melinda.’ The answer, it turns out, is threefold. Not only is Melinda ‘remarkably pretty’, but to add to the fact that ‘one never quite knew what went on in her head’ is the question of her indifference to him. Roger’s real problem, alas, is that he is not up to his inamorata’s fighting weight, that her attentions to him will always verge on the perfunctory, that she can take him or leave him, whatever his own feelings about being left.
What inspired Barbara to pick up a pen in the first place? To a genuine desire to explore some of the emotional complications of the world she was a part of can be added a straightforward wish to settle scores. If Quennell got off comparatively lightly, then other old friends were not so fortunate. ‘In this book two of the characters are portrayed in such a way as to have led a number of readers to identify them with the Sutros’, the plaintiffs’ QC insisted when A Love Match came to court. ‘Shameful behaviour on the part of the two characters is described, which as far as Mr and Mrs Sutro are concerned is completely without justification.’ Mr Justice Thesiger agreed: damages were paid and surviving copies disposed of. But for sustained, score-settling bitchiness, the memoirs are in a class of their own, not least for their portrait of vainglorious, layabout, sheet-chewing Cyril. At one point Connolly is pictured lying in recumbent misery with the bedclothes seeming to spew out of his mouth ‘like ectoplasm’. At another, a domestic crisis threatens to derail his social plans.
Still delicious blazing hot weather. Cyril has a lunch in London, so I take him into Ashford to catch the train. As usual, the stove is blocked and not drawing sufficiently to make hot water. Have to boil kettles to add to bath. A few drops of boiling water fell onto scowl-jowl-face’s Chinese coolie legs which he had dangling over the side of the bath; fearful abuse. Both part at the station delighted to see the last of each other.
Or there is Barbara’s account of the grand party, attended by Princess Margaret, to which husband and wife were invited in December 1951, an extraordinary comic set piece in which amusement and straightforward contempt both play their part. Grimly aware that more fuss is being made about Cyril than herself, she rushes up to him at the moment when he is being ‘hustled away to the Royal Dwarf’s table’ and screams, ‘It’s no good turning your back on me.’ She tries to talk to an unresponsive Lucian Freud, who is swiftly dragged off to safer havens by Lady Rothermere. Excluded and distressed, Barbara finds a chair and, sitting down with a glass in her hand, announces to the room at large that ‘There’s only one thing to do. Get drunk.’ Later Cyril and his friends return from supper: ‘They all emerge with a healthy tan, the acclaimed heroes of a Shackleton expedition, and mingle with the throwouts. I turn on Cyril, but we are interrupted by Orson Welles, so I try to be offensive to him but he doesn’t notice.’ The evening ends with a glimpse of Quennell making eyes at Lady Elizabeth von Hofmannsthal. His ‘puce-tinted face was trying to express ardency,’ Barbara savagely concluded, ‘but he seemed to me to be just a dreary old zombie putting on airs.’
What did Barbara hope to achieve by these high-octane displays of temperament? Nothing, probably, rather than the adrenalin rush of a slight avenged. But if there is something rather impressive about her complete disregard for what people might think of her – one of her most mystifying tricks as a memoirist is to spin out stories that present her in a bad light – then there is no getting away from the deep-rooted vulnerability, the sense common to nearly every account of her in no-holds-barred, man-quelling action that here is someone who not only makes life harder for herself with each self-protecting twist of her personality but who knows it as well. And while the merits of her books can be overstated, she remains a classic example of the woman writer inhibited by the company she keeps – a genuine stylist who deserves to be taken out of the context of the world in which she was compelled to operate and given something rarely allowed her by her teeming horde of male associates: a life of her own.
14.
Afterwards
I thought the demise of Horizon would make some changes for all concerned. It is not a bad thing, I think. It must be a relief for Cyril who can now become more himself which in a sense Horizon (more especially you and myself) was preventing.
Peter Watson, letter to Sonia, 4 January 1950
The first Lost Girl to detach herself from the life of literary London, and indeed from Connolly’s orbit, was Lys. By the spring of 1950 she had moved out of Sussex Place to temporary lodgings at Sonia’s flat in Percy Street and accepted a job as editorial assistant in the London office of the New Yorker. Already there were more ambitious plans afoot, in particular a move across the Atlantic. Peter Watson, writing to her late in April, noted that he is ‘worried in case I was wrong to advise you not to go to the Sta
tes. At certain moments any change can be a good thing in one’s life but in one way the struggle for life is far worse out there than it is in Europe.’ But the strain of presiding over Horizon’s last rites and the emotional struggles with Connolly had seriously affected her health. Early in April, underweight and exhausted, she left London for a recuperative holiday with her friend Lauretta Hugo at the Château Bellevue in Orthez. Here in the warmth of Gascony she spent most of her time gardening, pausing, she informed Sonia, only to ‘read, eat, drink and sleep – I think I am getting a little fatter and certainly look better’. If Lys had thought that by leaving both his house and his place of work she could separate herself from Connolly, she was sadly mistaken. Though by now deeply embroiled with Barbara, the ex-editor was still busy constructing castles in the air. According to Watson, shortly before he left for a stay in Paris, ‘Cyril asked me . . . should he marry Lys?’
But Lys, by this time, was beyond marrying. Watson had tried to dissuade her from relocating to America on the grounds, he told Sonia, that ‘she will spend so much money getting there and on a New York hotel and she doesn’t have a definite job or even many friends there. It would surely be a mistake?’ Such reports that reached Connolly of the new life she was establishing for herself among the local society hostesses while working as an editor at Doubleday were calculated to make him seethe with envy: ‘Lys has been adopted by Alice Obolensky and given a suite at the Regis (2nd best hotel in New York),’ Evelyn Waugh informed Nancy Mitford in April 1951. ‘That makes it much worse for him.’ For several years afterwards, Connolly continued to bombard his lost love with letters of fervent devotion and elegiac reproach. ‘The other night I had a sudden vision of you walking towards me along the edge of the pavement in the brown coat I bought you with the velvet collar and a yellow scarf round your head,’ he told her in 1953, ‘it was not a dream but like a shot in a film sequence. Ever since I have tried to start this film going again but with no success.’
Tokens of esteem, as well as letters, sped westward across the Atlantic. Waugh, sending news to Nancy in the spring of 1954 of a ‘very happy day in London with Cyril Boots’, reported that he ‘bought a silver knife, fork and spoon in a leather case to send to Lys. Poignant.’ Whatever Lys may have thought of these gifts, she was determined not to repeat the mistakes of the previous decade, and in 1956 married a Duke University psychologist named Dr Sigmund Koch. Stephen Spender, who met the couple at a party in London six years later, was unimpressed. ‘Dr Koch is bearded, has a carved-wooden semitic profile, a smirking expression and a very loud voice. He called everybody “old boy” which he seems to think the right therapeutic approach to the English.’ Subsequently, he got drunk and embarked on a series of imitations of English speech in which he delivered attacks on English food. Lys, Spender thought, was ‘just as silly as 25 years ago’ and ‘told interminable stories at dinner about uncles and aunts all of which were to illustrate her new attitude to England derived from Sigmund K.’
Subsequently Lys vanished from the literary world, ceased to write to old English companions and devoted herself entirely to domestic life. Beginning work on Friends of Promise, his study of Connolly and the Horizon circle in the early 1980s, the academic Michael Shelden was told by one source that she had died years ago, and by another that she had disappeared into the rural wilderness of North Carolina, unreachable by post or telephone. Eventually, and with the help of Spender, Shelden tracked her down to the University of Boston, where her husband now held a professorial post. Visiting her home in the Boston suburbs in the autumn of 1984 and remembering the celebrated portrait by Lee Miller, Shelden was shocked to find ‘all that beauty had gone. Her complexion was pasty, her eyes dull. She was wearing a shapeless pants suit made of dark green fabric, and she spent a lot of time pushing back the sleeves, which were too long.’ The contrast between her present existence and the life she had led in Bedford Square were further emphasised by a trip to the local grocery store where, as Shelden watched the cashier ring up the items Lys had purchased for their dinner, he thought ‘how commonplace she looked in these surroundings’.
After the evening meal had been eaten, and encouraged by her guest, Lys descended to the basement and returned at intervals with handfuls of Connolly’s letters. ‘She did this several times, and each time I could see that she had been crying . . .’ Shelden recalled. ‘There was no mistaking the pain it caused her to read those letters again.’
Lys died in 1989, three months after the publication of Friends of Promise. ‘Well, I’ve had my seventieth birthday,’ she told Shelden in their final telephone conversation, ‘which is something, don’t you think, in this polluted world of ours? I mean, just to live that long.’
The patterns of Janetta’s post-war career may be followed in Frances Partridge’s diaries. A daughter, named Georgiana, was born in 1949, but by the early summer of the following year Frances had begun to suspect that the marriage was in trouble. When the Kees paid a weekend visit in May 1950, Frances noted ‘certain symptoms . . . that have revived a buried disquiet. Why aren’t they happier, I wonder?’ To the chatelaine of Ham Spray the problem seemed to lie in Robert Kee’s constant criticism of his wife and her reluctance to defend herself. ‘This ghost train running along old railway lines is very disturbing,’ Frances concluded. ‘If Robert goes on writing down her character she will go off with someone who thinks her wonderful, and there are plenty who will.’
This was a prophetic remark. In London in the summer of 1949, Janetta had been introduced to the mercurial figure of Derek Jackson. A brilliant physicist, who combined a private fortune with an overbearing personal manner, Jackson held political views so extreme that during the Second World War, in which he served with distinction in the RAF, he was very nearly lynched by the members of a bomber crew to whom he had suggested that they were fighting ‘against the wrong enemy’. At this point Jackson, married to his second wife, Pamela Mitford, was living the somewhat peripatetic life of a tax exile. By September 1950 Frances reported that the Kees’ marriage had broken down and that Janetta had left for France. From here arrived a letter announcing that ‘she hoped never to return to married life’. Then, in December, came the news that Janetta had been seen in London, and that ‘Derek Jackson was pressing her to marry him’.
Early in January 1951, Frances contrived to meet Janetta in London. She appeared at the Great Western Hotel ‘looking very charming, and more like the Bohemian of past days than I had expected’. Jackson seemed to be the main figure in her life, Frances noted during a subsequent visit to Ham Spray, ‘but I would guess that “love” is not what she feels for him’. Whatever Janetta may have felt, both parties took immediate steps to divorce their other halves; she and Jackson married in 1952. The marriage, however, was short-lived. Shortly after Janetta had given birth to their daughter Rose at a nursing home in Welbeck Street in August 1954, Derek announced that he was leaving her for her half-sister Angela. Janetta’s explanation of the timing of this bombshell was that it stemmed from the perverse reasoning that ‘if you’re going to be beastly to someone you might as well be really beastly’. The half-sisters did not speak to each other for the next twenty-seven years.
Nevertheless, her separation from Jackson produced considerable material benefits. On the proceeds of the divorce settlement, of which the Evening Standard reported that she ‘cites a relative but is allowed to keep the name secret’, she was able to install herself and her three children at a house in Montpelier Square, Knightsbridge. It was here that she embarked on a brief but intense relationship with Arthur Koestler. The affair, described by Koestler as ‘a month of hell and heaven’, included a ten-day trip to Cornwall, visits to Paris, Salzburg and Vienna, a proposal of marriage (this was declined), outright physical violence, and Koestler’s eventual decision to leave London on the grounds that if he had not done so ‘I would at least have had a nervous breakdown, if not a car accident or a similar self-destructive manifestation. For the first time in [my] lif
e I felt it would be worthwhile to hang or do 20 years in jail for killing a woman.’
Janetta’s later attachments included Ralph Jervis, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Lucian Freud, the Duke of Devonshire and a much younger man who subsequently became her son-in-law. Her daughters regarded the succession of stepfathers – real and protemporaneous – with misgiving. Nicky, re-encountering Derek Jackson later in the 1950s and being asked if she remembered all the wonderful times they had had together, volunteered the single word ‘No.’ Yet the prospect of emotional stability lay at hand. Staying in Málaga with the Partridges in the winter of 1957, she was introduced to a Spanish nobleman named Jaime Parladé. Frances was impressed: ‘a young, slender Spaniard, with an oval face and long-lashed twinkling eyes’. A month later, Frances noted that she and Ralph had been ‘charmed . . . by his intelligence and gaiety’. By the mid-1960s Janetta was spending most of her time in Spain with Parladé, the latter using his professional expertise as a decorator to create a house at Torre de Tramores around the ruins of a Moorish castle. In 1971, Frances received a phone call announcing that ‘Jaime and I are going to do that marrying thing tomorrow.’
In later years, the Parladés constructed a second house at Alcuzcuz near San Pedro de Alcántara. James Lees-Milne, visiting in 1990, left an admiring account of ‘a grand Spanish villa belonging to the (today) absent husband Jaime, said to be Spain’s leading decorator of international repute’, the décor so artfully contrived that even such a practised connoisseur as Lees-Milne could not decide whether the house had been recently decorated in the Edwardian style or was a ‘genuine’ house of 1910. As for his hostess, Janetta, he decided she was