The Lost Girls

by D. J. Taylor

  So she was. And yet this was a world in which being absolutely horrible to people can look like a kind of default setting. Was Evelyn Waugh at all intimidating? I wonder, with the nonchalant air of one who proposes that Mrs Thatcher might occasionally have mildly trodden down the toes of one or two of her cabinet colleagues. ‘Well, he wouldn’t hesitate to sort of snap back and say, “Well, you’re a bit of a bore, aren’t you?”. . . And treated with such sort of respect . . .’ Janetta laments. All this raises the question of the qualities that she admires in the members of the Horizon circle, what separates the sheep from the goats and distinguishes lustre and éclat from a straightforward ability to type. And here, it turns out that Janetta and the man who christened her ‘Mrs Bluefeet’ are fighting on the same side, for the entity that neither of them can tolerate for a moment is a bore. Why, I ask her, are people so fascinated by Connolly? ‘Partly because he was awfully good at . . . describing things,’ Janetta assures me, ‘and I mean his analysis of things was fascinating.’ Then comes the clincher: ‘He wasn’t a bore in any way.’ So was not being a bore important? ‘I think I was awfully lucky in knowing an awful lot of people that weren’t bores . . . I mean, they were fascinating, really, on the whole, the people I saw . . .’

  And so the roll-call of the inhabitants of Cyril’s world marches on: Anthony Powell (who she ‘couldn’t bear’); Orwell, whose ideological estrangement from Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit she recalls (‘Orwell was very odd, what he did . . . It was very complicated, his political life . . . I can’t really follow it’), the ‘delightful’ Peter Watson (‘in those days it was so awful for the poor buggers, you know, and he had the most ghastly time: he was always being robbed or something’). All this is par for the course, but occasionally there stirs the ghost of something else, the faint yet enticing outline of a path into a cultural world that is nothing like our own. ‘So they all knew each other,’ she remarks at one point, of the Horizon set. ‘There was only one sort of nucleus – there weren’t all sorts of fascinating groups of people in Hampstead and God knows where that there are now – there was just one . . . If somebody would suddenly turn up from America, Cyril would at once know them. And it was on its own in a way, so that if you knew those people you met anyone that turned up . . . which was very nice.’ Outside the builders’ vans jockey for position and the polythene billows over Cadogan Place.

  Janetta died in June 2018 at the age of ninety-six. Clearing out the flat, her three daughters discovered, somewhat to their surprise, that she had kept everything. From trunks and cardboard boxes spilled forth a host of photograph albums and correspondence files extending back over eighty years. Here were letters to and from her mother in the 1930s, unpublished novels from the post-war era, a cache of flimsy airmails addressed to the Partridges’ lair in Wiltshire by the Cairo-and Bari-bound Kenneth. Kept apart from the main archive, and eventually run to earth in a bookcase beneath the bound volumes of Horizon, were a dozen or so letters from Connolly, carefully pressed between a card advertising his memorial service at St Mary le Strand, London, on 20 December 1974. Composed on Horizon or White’s club notepaper, none of them is dated, although the subject matter – the trip to Paris, Kenneth’s possible return from the Balkans – suggests that they were written in the last months of 1944 and the early part of 1945. Janetta is ‘Dear Janetta’; once or twice, when the emotional thermostat is being turned up a notch or two, ‘Darling Janetta’.

  The remarkable thing about this 10,000 words or so of hastily scribbled correspondence is the number of different Connollys on display. Here, in quickfire succession, come a ruminative Connolly, a wistful Connolly, a despairing Connolly, a light-hearted Connolly, a vengeful Connolly, a Connolly content with the path he follows in life and a Connolly made wretched by a suspicion that he took a wrong turning many years ago and fell into a swamp from which no amount of endeavour can ever extricate him – so many Connollys, in fact, that a psychologist asked to separate out the real man from the stream of aliases would probably shake his head at the degree of emotional complexity on display. The shifts of gear can be bewildering and the endless self-examination slightly tedious – these, like everything else Connolly wrote, are essentially performances, designed to impress, to mystify and burnish up the Connolly myth along the way – but lurking beneath them, sometimes stalking their surfaces if it comes to that, is a genuine sense of concern for Janetta’s wellbeing:

  You must cheer up – if Kenneth is getting some leave – even if it is only leave – at least you will see him and then can put your point of view to him, and give him an ultimatum if necessary. Don’t be too upset about it. You hurt H. S. [Hugh Slater] enormously without meaning to by leaving him, & now you are being hurt – all human beings hurt each other where love is concerned, except those who have found out how hurt they can get & who therefore try not to hurt other people. I am sure Kenneth can’t grasp what you are feeling, because he hasn’t felt all that himself. Anyhow, you have got a baby, a home and a paint-box . . . and also you know quite well that you aren’t deserted – only neglected – which is quite different & not nearly so bad.

  Another letter – internal evidence suggests that it was written in the first weeks of 1945 – returns to this theme, convicting Sinclair-Loutit not of callousness but defective timing: ‘I think that your whole predicament is due only to a miscalculation of Kenneth’s about when the war would end.’ As for the immediate future:

  I think it is terribly hard for you, but you have got a temporary home, which is more than most people, with substitute parents who adore you, a studio, an ability to paint & read; & the time to do so – and a baby – which I understand is held to be both a dynamo of happiness and a pledge for the future – it is really folly to undo all this knitting – unless you are quite certain that you don’t love K. any more & never will . . .

  On the other hand, Connolly’s emotional generosity would always be tempered by an awareness of somebody else’s pain: his own, to be exact, which pulses away beneath these reams of sound advice like a generator’s hum. Janetta is there to be flattered. He has only three women friends, he tells her – herself, Elizabeth Glenconner and Joan Rayner, ‘and you are so beautiful, so sympathetic, so much a part of my douceur de vivre’. But she is also there to be quietly, affectionately yet decisively reproached for not playing the central role in Connolly’s life that a fairer wind and fewer emotional complications might once have allowed her. A third letter remembering long-ago days spent in the West Country develops into a paroxysm of yearning for what might have been.

  You say you always get what you want, all I can say is what a pity you didn’t want me, or you would have been a painter instead of a buxom matron embowered in bourgeois bliss. At least when you were with Humphrey there was always a bracing feeling of hope. Now whenever I see you I start brooding about our might have beens, – if you had been at St Gervais when I walked round to see you, if they had given me your right address at Hammersmith instead of one in Glasgow when I sent an S.O.S. to you, if I had never met D. & we had had an affair from when we met at Patrick’s party. As we should have done – or if you had never met Humphrey, or anyhow not fallen for him . . . or not married him when I asked you to marry me!

  The obvious question to ask of this impassioned exercise in subjunctive living is: how much of it is true, and how much retrospective tinkering? Did the Connolly of 1940, still married to Jean and heavily involved with Diana, think that he could have carried off an eighteen-year-old girl? Is he really serious? Or myth-making? And what effect is he trying to produce on Janetta? Is it really helpful, for example, to tell a twenty-three-year-old woman with a small child whose other half is somewhere in Occupied Europe that ‘My Id is still in love with you and always assumes – as Ids always do – that the past is the present and that no one else exists’, or that ‘I would have liked to have had that baby you have got’? Or is this simply the way that Connolly’s mind worked in the company of old friends and lovers, where anything c
an be said and everybody is quietly compensating for everybody else?

  Certainly, several of the letters embark on Connolly’s most regular emotional trick, which is to play one woman off against another. Here, somewhat unexpectedly, the villain of the piece is Diana: ‘anything to do with D. always upsets me’, claims a rather awful letter from sometime in 1944, ‘which is why I can’t bear to see her. I am emotionally incompetent, you and she were the last people whom I could have loved & married, who had the key to the ruined temple, if only you had ever made any effort in that direction’. To the webweaver of Bedford Square, Diana is

  five years of reproaches, tears, misery, doors banging, suitcases bumping, angry letters, trains, farewells, – I think she is a faithless bitch, you have no idea what an Enfer you pull me back towards & what is the good? Unless people are going to live together again they will always be disappointed again by meeting & one of them will suffer.

  A little more determination, a little more insistence on bringing down the one true prize might have seen him through:

  With a little more courage and ruthlessness, I could have taken the place of H. S. or even, later, of Kenneth and I know we shd have been happy. Diana and I were like two pieces in a jig-saw puzzle which one keeps fitting together because they must fit, they so nearly do, & yet they don’t quite do, & perhaps with a little more force they would have stuck. I think she specialises in the Art of Love i.e. the art of keeping her lover perpetually in love with her through Retreat, Advance, mental titivation, books, music, uncertainties etc, while what I want is someone to go down the Dordogne from the source with me in a canoe. It doesn’t matter if we never do it. They must want to. Now I have lost both of you & of course most of myself.

  He once thought the ‘community of mind’ he shared with Diana was unbreakable, he concludes, ‘and yet she broke it’. To which it might be pointed out that Connolly was quite happy to shatter communities of mind himself if he felt like it, and that quite a few of his emotional sulks are those of a circus ringmaster faced by a hitherto docile exhibit that has suddenly got out of hand.

  And still the letter writer keeps changing shape, putting on new disguises, bewildering his correspondent with lightning about-turns and changes of tack. There is a high-spirited Connolly, in a letter that looks as if it was written towards the end of 1944, pleased by the success of The Unquiet Grave (‘My book goes like one o’clock. The Queen sent an S.O.S. for one yesterday’) and claiming to have achieved some kind of inner peace: ‘I am very happy, free of remorse, regret & memory – I live in the present, I love my work, I see the war clouds drifting away & the sun of civilisation slowly rising and getting a little warmer every day.’ And then there is a deeply distressed, self-pitying Connolly, who compares his wounded heart to ‘a fish which has been knocked on the head & flung on the bottom of a boat & which suddenly gives a few convulsive leaps to everyone’s embarrassment’, for whom even the prospect of a trip to newly liberated Paris can only offer a few bittersweet intimations of a glory that has been swallowed up by time:

  My annual bid for escape having somehow failed, my heart is a cess-pool covered by a heavy iron slab, which I no longer have the strength to lift. I don’t really feel I shall ever get to Paris, and even if I do I shall only find unhappy memories there. For me now Paris=Jean=youth=hope, therefore causes only pain & disillusion. Perhaps I shall find a wonderful French girl – or an American – but even then it can’t ever be the same.

  Jean. Diana. Janetta. Joan. Lys (whose name surfaces only twice in the entire correspondence). . . It is tempting to see this groaning catalogue of emotional disturbance as a kind of mosaic, a swirl of dancing female figures from which a single male face stares self-aggrandisingly and, to do him justice, self-accusingly out. But perhaps a better image would be that of some far-flung galaxy, embedded deep in the rim of the cosmos, dominated by Planet Connolly, in which lesser moons and satellites oscillate back and forth. What did the correspondents make of it all? Did Connolly believe everything he had written? And did Janetta believe everything she read? Or did she assume that he was playing some complicated and well-nigh unfathomable emotional game, in which every utterance is overstated and every observation about third parties subordinate to the relationship being lived out on the page? After all, if some of the letters are sometimes there to advertise Connolly’s own sense of guilt, then, equally, others are clearly intended to awaken this emotion in Janetta. And how would she have felt when she read the paragraph that runs:

  Of course, you are right about H. S. [Hugh Slater] – but who, knowing you at 17 would want to change you? As I said to him once, others, with other girls one can look on at nature – but you were nature.

  Flattered? Wary? Indulgent? At this distance in time, and with both writer and recipient dead, who can tell? But now it is time to put the puppets back in the box, for our game is all played out.

  Illustrations Insert

  Frances Partridge cuts Janetta’s hair, Ham Spray, 1936. (Estate of Frances Partridge)

  Ralph, Frances and Janetta, late 1930s. (Estate of Frances Partridge)

  ‘I envy you the lovely Janetta.’ (Connolly family)

  High jinks at Tickerage – Peter Quennell and Glur, late 1930s. (Sarah Gibb)

  Connolly with Jean, Angela and Janetta, weekending at Tickerage, late 1930s. (Connolly family)

  ‘I will not be faithful, I want love too’ – Diana, late 1930s. (Connolly family)

  Connolly and Diana on the rocks, late 1930s. (Connolly family)

  ‘[Stephen Spender] was very nice but I can never feel quite at ease or natural with him.’ (Cecil Beaton/Getty Images)

  ‘One of those rich people who without seeming at all dependent on his wealth … manages to get the utmost in the way of pleasure and beauty out of riches’ – Lucian Freud’s portrait of Peter Watson. (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK/© The Lucian Freud Archive/Bridgeman Images)

  Lys, 1941. (Connolly family)

  Joan, early 1940s. (Connolly family)

  Lys as fashion model. (Connolly family)

  Kenneth Sinclair-Loutit. (David Sinclair-Loutit)

  More high jinks at Tickerage – Quennell and Barbara. (Connolly family)

  Charles Langford-Hinde – Barbara’s lost love. (Connolly family)

  ‘Everything about you interests me and makes me miserable’ – Barbara sunbathing at the Cot. (Connolly family)

  Topolski in his studio. (Powell/Stringer/Getty Images)

  Landscape with Figures – Osbert Lancaster’s drawing of the Café Royal, 1942. Barbara, Quennell, Connolly and Lys are clearly identifiable in the bottom left-hand corner. Brian Howard is top left on the balcony. Lancaster himself is to the left of the central potted plant. (Clare Hastings)

  ‘My dear, I have done the most incomparably foolish thing’ – Brian Howard, early 1940s.

  ‘She’s a real minx, this one’ – King Farouk, 1940s. (© Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans)

  Nicky Loutit, mid-1940s. (Nicky Loutit)

  Kenneth keeps in touch from Cairo, 1944. (Nicky Loutit)

  Horizon’s new editorial secretary, Sonia, 1945. (Orwell Archive)

  Julian Maclaren-Ross. (Nick Jaeger)

  Evelyn Waugh, 1940s. (Bettmann/Getty Images)

  Lucian Freud, 1945. (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

  ‘Cyril Connolly has moved into Regent’s Park in a decent house of which he has taken every decent room: the rest go to a Mrs Lootit.’ – Nicky’s drawing of Sussex Place.

  Lys, Connolly and Sonia, mid-1940s. (Connolly family)

  ‘You see, I’ve always been good with animals’ – Orwell and his adopted son Richard, 1946. (Vernon Richards)

  Barbara with John Sutro, 1947. (Connolly family)

  Post-war literary society. Lys in chair, flanked by Sacheverell Sitwell, Quennell and Connolly. (Connolly family)

  ‘My stepfather wanted to kill me’ – Robert Kee, late 1940s. (Estate of Frances Partridge)

  ‘As for t
he secretaries, Lys was beautifully neat and, as I remember her, Miss Brownell was quite presentable’ – Horizon office, late 1949. (Orwell Archive)

  Evidence of Connolly’s regard. (Orwell Archive)

  Osbert Lancaster’s view of the trip to France, 1950. Barbara, Farouk, Connolly as pasha. (Clare Hastings)

  Lys on the beach, America, late 1950s. (Michael Shelden)

  Notes and Further Reading

  This book makes use of a number of unpublished sources. They include the letters and diaries formerly in the possession of Barbara Skelton, hereafter [Skelton], correspondence, diaries and notebooks previously belonging to Janetta Parladé [Parladé], Lys, Sonia and Diana’s letters to Connolly, now owned by the Connolly family [Connolly], Peter Watson’s letters to Cecil Beaton, currently held by St John’s College, Cambridge [Beaton], correspondence and a number of personal items previously owned by Sonia Orwell, now in the Orwell Archive at University College, London [Orwell Archive], Sonia’s letters to William Coldstream, currently held by the Tate Gallery [Tate], Connolly’s letters to Alan Pryce-Jones, now in the Beinecke Library, Yale University [Yale] and several letters sent by Barbara to Anthony and Violet Powell [Powell]. Unless otherwise stated, the place of publication is London.