by D. J. Taylor
a once-beautiful, sophisticated, intellectual moll . . . She frightened me to death on the two or three times I met her at Ham Spray in the early 1950s, is now a bad seventy, straight hair pulled back like a skull-cap, one drooping eye, raddled skin, hollow chest and bulging stomach. But nice and welcoming and undoubtedly clever. Very anti-Christian, which upsets me rather. She destroyed the chapel in the house – ‘I can’t abide such things . . . had to take away cartloads of saints.’ Fanny Partridge staying and the only other guest present. She has long been a sort of mother to J.
The party lunched off foie gras with truffles, fish in brochette and chocolate cake. Afterwards a fascinated Lees-Milne looked around the house and its contents – the easy chairs covered with pieces of Turkey carpet, the leather-seated fenders and the Edwardian lamps and shades – examined the pictures, watched a grey parrot in the courtyard imitating the ninety-year-old Frances as she capered before it, and wandered through a garden crammed with exotic plants brought back from abroad. Jaime died in January 2015, after which his widow returned to London and a final resting place in a ground-floor flat in Cadogan Square. She died in June 2018.
Orwell’s funeral took place on 26 January 1950 at Christ Church, Albany Street, London NW1. The body was subsequently interred at a plot in the village graveyard at Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire, secured by David Astor. Sonia’s distress was palpable: ‘dazed’, thought Malcolm Muggeridge, who decided that he would always love her for her ‘true tears’. Afterwards, in the company of Janetta, she departed on a restorative holiday in the south of France. There was a brief re-encounter with Merleau-Ponty and a trip to Saint-Tropez, after which they quarrelled again and parted for good.
Far from lessening Sonia’s sense of responsibility, the vast posthumous sales of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four may be said to have increased it. ‘Of course, the money’s not really mine’, she reputedly told a friend who had congratulated her on some charitable act. Certainly, her work-rate during the 1950s and 1960s was prodigious. Among other activities, she held down an editorial job at the firm of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, co-edited the Paris-based journal Art and Literature and organised a highly successful international writers’ conference at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival attended by such luminaries as Norman Mailer, Rebecca West and Mary McCarthy. Ever anxious to preserve her late husband’s memory, she established an Orwell Archive at University College London and, together with her collaborator Ian Angus, began work on the four-volume edition of his Collected Journalism, Letters and Essays. Appearing in 1968, this won high praise for the scrupulousness of its editing and the compilers’ determination to bring out little-known items from the Orwell canon into the public gaze.
Sonia’s personal life was much less successful. A second marriage in 1958 to Michael Pitt-Rivers, who had spent eighteen months in prison on a homosexuality charge, ended within two years. ‘The young man won’t like all this booky talk’, the novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett cautioned when Sonia brought her husband to lunch. Thereafter, opinions of her were sharply divided. To her admirers she was a loyal, devoted and generous friend, always happy to encourage a fledgling talent or support a writer who had fallen on evil days. To her detractors she was a bossy, ‘difficult’, self-pitying drunk, ready to fly off the handle at a moment’s notice. Frances Partridge’s diary records an evening in December 1965 at which Janetta described the critic Raymond Mortimer leaving a party of Sonia’s and innocently remarking, ‘Aren’t you a lucky girl to have this lovely house?’ According to Frances ‘she was drunk as usual and blazed out with: “Lucky – a house! You don’t think that makes any difference when all the time . . . etc.” I don’t know exactly what the words were but they were delivered with a shriek and she banged the door angrily on him.’ Sonia’s only comment was ‘After all, I’ve never really liked Raymond.’
Sonia’s last years, mostly spent in Paris, were a decline. Her unhappiness had two principal causes. The first was regret at her decision to allow Professor Bernard Crick to write a biography of her first husband. The second was her growing suspicion that she had been swindled by the firm of accountants, Harrison, Son, Hill & Co., who administered the affairs of George Orwell Productions, the company formed immediately before his death. A long letter sent to Janetta in November 1979 sets both these anxieties in sharp relief. ‘It all started in December 1977,’ she explained. ‘It’s all so amazing and literally terrifying and even after all this time I can hardly believe it. But the fact is that I’m now involved in a huge, lengthy law-suit with them and I’m living in a very distressing world . . .’ As for Crick, she claimed to have been ‘bullied into commissioning a biography of George because people were writing such bad and stupid ones all round the place and the person I picked, much abetted by the publisher, has turned out to be quite ghastly, incapable of writing properly, bent on somehow needling George and making him out an unpleasant person’.
At the heart of her troubles lay an overpowering sense of guilt. ‘I really do wish I was dead,’ she told Janetta, ‘but I feel I must fight this law-suit and do my best to get the biography as accurate as possible in a desperate effort to right some of the wrongs I seem to have committed.’ This was highly unfair to Crick, whose George Orwell: A Life was praised for its even-handedness and the punctiliousness of its research.
Sonia died late in 1980, a few weeks after the book appeared. The court case was settled a few weeks later. Most of the money had been lost by the accountants in foolish investments. So little remained that there was barely enough to defray the expenses of the funeral. Reflecting on a friendship that had endured for nearly forty years, Janetta noted that she was ‘very sad and touched by it all . . . It’s very much a part of me that’s died with her.’
Sequestered in their Kentish cottage, together with several guinea fowl, some geese and a South American coatimundi named Kupy of uncertain temperament, Cyril and Barbara Connolly continued to fight, as Cyril once put it, ‘like kangaroos’. Punctuated by outsize doses of husbandly melancholia and periodic crises in the pet department (‘His Animal has been sacked from the zoo and sent home to Oak Cottage in disgrace’, Waugh reported to Nancy Mitford late in 1954), the marriage limped on until early 1955. It was at this point that Connolly became aware of his wife’s infidelity with the publisher George Weidenfeld, apparently by walking on a whim through the front door of the latter’s house in Chester Square and finding them in flagrante. The situation was complicated by the fact that Weidenfeld, already installed as Connolly’s publisher, was about to issue Barbara’s first novel, A Young Girl’s Touch.
Though represented as something very near to farce – Janetta remembered the affair as a case of ‘people literally hiding in cupboards in hotels’ – the swerve to Weidenfeld is a classic instance of Barbara’s fatalism, her tendency to take the worst possible option when experience counselled caution. ‘The situation is getting more insoluble and distressing,’ she wrote in her diary at around this time. ‘I find it increasingly difficult to think of leaving Cyril, and yet I seem to have outwardly made up my mind to do so.’ As for Weidenfeld, she confessed that she was ‘simply obsessed with him sexually’. Although she acknowledged that Connolly was the love of her life, she allowed herself to be divorced early in 1956. Connolly, summarising the situation in a letter to Sonia from Saint-Tropez, noted that ‘It is all absolute hell. I can’t say anything except I went to meet B. here & found that she had indeed promised to marry W . . . “at last I have found a man to whom I can be faithful” – on the other hand she says she loves me, feels tied to me, doesn’t want to leave me, would come back at once “if he would let go his end of the rope.”’ Her marriage to Weidenfeld, which took place some months later, was in trouble from the honeymoon onward, when her ex-husband was discovered to be holidaying on the same Mediterranean island. Just as Weidenfeld was cited by Connolly as co-respondent in the first set of divorce proceedings, so Connolly was cited by Weidenfeld in the second.
Now in her early fortie
s, Barbara continued to attract admirers. One of these, the painter Michael Wishart, left an arresting account of her ability to magnetise the male gaze. ‘One glance explained the abundant notches in her tomahawk,’ he claimed. ‘The first time I saw her things swam before my eyes.’ Much of her allure was associative, Wishart thought. ‘She had lived with a succession of intelligent men and a dusting of their brilliance had rubbed off on her. She had an enquiring mind where the arts and sexual relationships were concerned’, as well as ‘the courtesan’s chameleon adaptability and ruthlessness . . .’ A mark of this adaptability was her decision, taken in 1959, to move to New York. Here she worked in a bookshop and as a dental assistant, and had affairs with, among others, the drama critic Kenneth Tynan, the New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams and Bob Silvers, founder of the New York Review of Books. It was on Silvers’s yacht that the young Alan Bennett, then on tour with Beyond the Fringe, encountered her in the summer of 1963: unsmiling and, he deduced, unapproachable. A visit to Andy Warhol’s studio to watch a pornographic film being made came to an abrupt end when Barbara took offence at Warhol’s suggestion that he could create a role for a grandmother.
A brief third marriage, in 1966, to Janetta’s former husband Derek Jackson (‘It was not for love that I married Professor Jackson’) soon perished in mutual acrimony. Among its highlights was an evening in a Paris nightclub at which Jackson, exasperated by his wife’s habit of talking across him to a mutual friend, seized their two heads and banged them together; Barbara then bit his thumb. On another occasion she thrust a second pet coatimundi, named Florie, in his face and urged it to bite him. Subsequently, she retreated to a Provençal farmhouse named the Mas de Colombier and embarked on a tempestuous relationship with the French writer Bernard Frank. There were trips to Antibes to visit Graham Greene, the frequent arrival of friends to stay and the destruction of a great deal of crockery. Of one meal, eaten when Connolly was a guest, she noted that ‘I cannot recall the menu, but I do remember that during the dessert course a pot of cream aimed at me skimmed past Cyril’s head . . .’
In her mid-seventies Barbara grew bored with France. With many of her friends dead and most of the others alienated by her two scarifying volumes of memoirs, she returned to England and very soon succumbed to an inoperable brain tumour. In her last weeks, according to Connolly’s daughter Cressida, at whose Worcestershire house she was cared for, ‘all her rancour, sadness and fury fell away, leaving only the best intact: her intelligence and curiosity, her elegance, her marvellously soft skin – and a loving side I had never seen before’. Barbara died in January 1996, two days before her eightieth birthday.
The end of the war found Angela still living in the West Country, making model houses which Brasco sold to souvenir shops. Subsequently, his behaviour became even more erratic and she returned to London with her two children. She was later reunited with René de Chatellus, whom she consented to marry and live with in Paris. But the sparkle had gone out of the French count, who became increasingly gloomy and prone to reflection.
Even Angela appeared to believe that her elopement with her half-sister’s husband, Derek Jackson, in the summer of 1954, might possibly have been a mistake. Certainly, the passage devoted to the episode in her memoirs consists of only half-a-dozen anguished sentences:
A new lover I was mad about joined us in Brittany, and then we lived together in France until he left me three years later. It had all caused so much pain and misery to those he had abandoned, and finally me too, that there was little happiness during those years. Many people said it served me right and I dare say it did. Others wouldn’t speak to me. Only the lover went unscathed and went on to marry two or three more people. In the end I wished to God he had never wanted me or I had never given in. It makes me sick, even now, to remember and write about it.
Angela later spent time in Australia, and at the age of sixty-five married a Turk named Ali Bulent Rauf with whom she lived companionably for the last ten years of his life. Interviewed by The Times in her eighties, she remarked that: ‘It’s difficult to be monogamous. You fall in love with someone and don’t look at anyone else, but the years pass and things change. I’ve never been married long enough to know how long monogamy is realistic. I imagine about seven years.’ Now reconciled with Janetta, she spent her tenth decade at a house in the Scottish borders being cared for by the staff and students of the Beshara School of Esoteric Education, which her last husband had co-founded with the aim of helping its followers ‘towards the realisation in each person of their indissoluble unity with the real being’. Angela died in 2012.
Diana had married the barrister Samuel ‘Sammy’ Cooke in 1945. The couple had two sons. Cooke enjoyed a distinguished legal career, was knighted and became a High Court judge, but suffered from a disease of the nervous system which caused him to take early retirement from his profession. He died in 1978. Long before this date, in fact as far back as the Horizon days, his widow had begun to write poetry. Her publications included Poems (1954) and The Heat and the Cold (1965). A Collected Poems appeared in 1973. Her subject matter included male inconstancy and unrequited love. Diana died in 2006.
Glur’s marriage to the hard-drinking John Dyson Taylor was short-lived. After giving birth to two sons, she suffered a breakdown and spent a year in a convalescent home. Dyson Taylor later absconded to Kitzbühel. Sarah, Glur’s daughter with Peter Quennell, was largely left to the care of her maternal grandmother. There was a brief stay at Clayton in the South Downs but, towards the end of the 1950s, Glur established herself in a small, top-floor flat in Notting Hill whose décor and furnishings remained unchanged for the next four decades. Though she retained her sense of humour and her good looks – according to one obituarist, her face in old age came to resemble a deeply etched Aztec mask – she was prey to melancholia, pining for company but sometimes prone to disparage it when it arrived. A series of lunch dates with Kingsley Amis came to an end when she discovered that he was a ‘terrible bore’. Towards the end of her life, she converted to Roman Catholicism, although she once confessed to a friend: ‘Darling, I believe there’s something called a lapsed Catholic. I think that’s what I am.’ Glur died in 2000.
Joan spent the rest of her long life in the company of Patrick Leigh Fermor. Between 1949 and 1954 the couple rented a flat in Charlotte Street. Subsequently they settled in Greece and, using a providential legacy from Lady Eyres-Monsell, spent the early 1960s building a house for themselves in Kardamyli. They were married in 1968. Joan remained on friendly terms with Connolly. In 1953, for example, she accompanied Cyril and Barbara on an excursion to France. Of her preliminary stay at the ‘Cot’, Barbara noted that ‘Cyril exaggeratedly well-mannered towards Joan in marked contrast to his attitude to me, which is worse than that of a man to his dog.’ Joan died in 2003. The Photographs of Joan Leigh Fermor: Artist and Lover was published in 2018.
The remainder of Anna Kavan’s career was seriously compromised by her addiction to heroin. She underwent another course of detoxification in 1946 at the Sanatorium Bellevue in Kreuzlingen. Of the novels that she published in the course of the next decade, Sleep Has His House (1948) was indifferently reviewed, while the firm she had commissioned to bring out A Scarcity of Love (1956) went bankrupt shortly afterwards. Two further books – Eagles’ Nest (1957) and A Bright Green Field (1958) – appeared in quick succession. Thereafter her connection with their publisher, Peter Owen, lapsed for another eight years.
Meanwhile, her personal life was disintegrating. Dr Bluth, her mentor and supplier, died in 1964. Shortly afterwards she became a victim of a change in official policy towards drug users. Hitherto, hard drugs, administered intravenously, had been prescribed legally to registered addicts. Following publication of the Brain Report of 1965, it was announced that these prescriptions would require a Home Office licence. Intended to address the issue of over-prescribing, this measure effectively criminalised many long-term users. By this time, presumably by registering with several different pra
ctitioners, Kavan had managed to stockpile huge quantities of heroin. These kept her afloat throughout the rest of her life. Ice (1967), a metaphysical thriller advertised as a ‘vision of a post-human future’, was respectfully received, but over three decades of exposure to drugs had made her system dangerously tolerant of their effects. She was found dead at her flat in Hillsleigh Road, Kensington, in December 1968, fully dressed, sprawled across the bed, a syringe in her arm, her head resting on the lacquer box in which she kept her supplies. The Drugs Squad subsequently discovered ‘enough heroin to kill the whole street’.
Evelyn Waugh maintained his reputation as one of the most considerable British novelists of the mid-twentieth century. His Sword of Honour trilogy was completed with the publication of Unconditional Surrender in 1961. A volume of autobiography, A Little Learning, appeared in 1964. Even before this date, Waugh had sunk into torpor. ‘There is nowhere I want to go and nothing I want to do and I am conscious of being an utter bore’, he informed a correspondent shortly before his death in April 1966.
Nancy Mitford spent the rest of her life in Paris, much of it in the fruitless pursuit of Colonel Gaston Palewski, General de Gaulle’s wartime directeur de cabinet, whom she had met in 1942. She continued to write novels but became better known for biographical works on predominantly French subjects. These included Madame de Pompadour (1954), Voltaire in Love (1957) and The Sun King (1966), a study of Louis XIV, whom she described, in quintessentially Mitford-esque terms, as ‘Absolute Heaven’. Nancy died in 1973.