Joan
Page 17
From the Caribbean islands, Paddy and Joan went to British Honduras and carried on through Central America. Because of Guatemala’s claim on British Honduras it was legally impossible for a British citizen to travel directly to Guatemala, but they succeeded in finding a guide through the jungle:
Paddy & I, (Costa wisely went the ordinary way) walked for four days through the ‘bush’ to Guatemala, encouraged by a charming Indian guide called Exaltacion Pook, but it was too tough to be pleasant – mud up to the knees, crawling a lot of the time through the undergrowth, pricked and stung by every leaf, climbing on or under, or, worst, along, huge fallen trees. There is no path since the hurricane a few years ago – but we saw baboons, huge butterflies & orchids, & slept in hammocks in villages where they had never seen what, alas, they called ‘red people’ before – or in palm leaf shelters in the middle of the forest.16
From Guatemala they went south to El Salvador and on to Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, which was celebrating Holy Week. Except for a few pages on Cuba, all the Central American republics were omitted from The Traveller’s Tree. The differences in their culture and social history, Paddy felt, were so considerable that they would unbalance the book. Besides, he hoped that an account of his subsequent journey might yield a sequel. That book was never written, however, and the draft notes he made towards it remain unpublished in a couple of old exercise books. At the end of their journey they were tired. Joan wrote that she was longing to get back to London ‘as really the people here, as opposed to the countries, have too little to offer’.
Paddy and Joan arrived at Tilbury on 20 May 1948. In The Times that morning they saw the headline ‘British Correspondent Killed’. It was Dick Wyndham. According to a story filed from Amman, he had died the previous day on the northern outskirts of Jerusalem while on an assignment for the Sunday Times. He had been photographing Arab troops as they moved into action when he was struck by a burst of machine-gun fire. Joan was deeply shaken and distressed. Wyndham, that ‘uncouth old schoolboy [. . .] a Sargent drawing of the 1914 subaltern come to life’,17 as Cyril Connolly called him, was dead. For Ian Fleming, he was ‘one of the great Bohemian figures of his age [. . .] a fine, careless figure, larger and more varied than the life around him’.18
Wyndham’s death marked the ending of Tickerage Mill, which Joan and that charmed circle of friends had known as a pre-war Arcadia. In another letter from Joan to Rayner she wrote about Dick: ‘It makes me furious to think of it, what a hopeless, stupid waste it all is. I’m afraid we shall miss him all our lives.’ Tickerage was being sold (a subsequent owner was Vivien Leigh), and Wyndham’s pictures went to Sotheby’s later in the year.
John was also dwelling on things lost. His wife Miranda was tall, blonde and slim and her physical resemblance to Joan was not unnoticed. John’s letters to Joan have mostly been destroyed, but he had obviously not recovered from the trauma of the break-up of their marriage. Joan wrote to him: ‘I got one letter from you this morning & another, very gloomy, some time ago, which I’ve been meaning to answer for ages. Thank you so much for them [. . .] You oughtn’t to feel gloomy, at any rate you ought to have little guilt & remorse – that should be more my side of it – but what’s the good? I shall obviously go on making a mess of things but I intend to try and enjoy myself while I do so.’19 At the end of the following year they met briefly in London and talked over old wounds and regrets. Once again John told her about his unhappiness and afterwards Joan wrote to him:
Darling John,
How unsatisfactory it was seeing you for such a horribly short time & how inadequate I feel about everything. I could kill myself for not having had a flat that week where we could anyhow have talked as long as we wanted. But I suppose these meetings in a void are always like that – too nerve-wracking & difficult whatever happens – & I doubt if we had talked for weeks whether we should have worked things out to our satisfaction – of course I had ’flu too and that didn’t help. I do think you are wrong to feel that you could have changed things by some means or by behaving differently or by being different in some way – I know it was entirely my fault & nothing could have changed my decisions – everything you ever did, in fact, only made me put off separating longer. I think Cyril is right in a way – I don’t think I shall ever be good at married life – which is the reason I don’t try again. But it was lovely seeing you & do please come back soon & let us then arrange to have more time.
I’m just off to Dumbleton with Graham for Christmas. I meant to write to you the day you left but felt entirely unable to & found every excuse – ’flu, Paris again to get my car, etc. Why? the feeling one can never explain or say what one means, I suppose.
My best love
Joan.20
Rayner stayed abroad for several more years in Australia and then returned to Singapore. Although he published a couple of books, he never returned to the world of journalism, and for the remainder of his working life he received a salary from the Foreign Office. Joan and he continued to meet and sometimes write to one another. Their letters were always warm and affectionate. John Betjeman, Tom Driberg and Costa, among others, remained mutual friends. In all John and Miranda went on to have four children.
In April 1948 Cyril Connolly suggested to the publisher Hamish Hamilton and his American associate Cass Canfield that they should let him write a travel book about Aquitaine, ‘a very balmy and civilised region of France’.21 Lacking money as ever, he persuaded Hamish Hamilton to give him an advance of £200 to help pay for the trip, which he thought would last for about two months. In return he would deliver 70,000 words for £350. Cyril’s original intention was that Dick Wyndham would accompany him as his photographer, but following his death he felt that Joan would be the ideal replacement. Joan was more than willing to accept the commission and on 4 August she left for France.
They met at Valence, south of Lyon. Cyril was recovering from food poisoning and a temperature, although he feared that his sickness might have been prompted by feelings of guilt: he had begun to tire of his partner Lys Lubbock, who had just left him to return to England. Cyril and Joan drove to a two-star restaurant where he could only sit and watch while Joan enjoyed the specialities of the house – truffled galantine de caneton and quenelles de langouste and a delicious white Hermitage called Chante Alouette. The following day, there was another excellent lunch and Joan took lots of photographs of the chef in the kitchen as he stirred pans full of wonderful sauces. In her pictures it is as if Joan is seeing France through Connolly’s eyes – market stalls laden with fruit and vegetables, a chef with a table of game spread out in front of him, a sideboard heavily laden with food sufficient for a banquet, and the restaurant itself, the tables, white tablecloths and cutlery all ready for the customers.
Paddy was already in France working on The Traveller’s Tree. He was staying with Walter and Amy Smart, his old Cairo friends, who had a house in an apple orchard at Gadencourt,22 a little village on the banks of the River Eure. Patrick Kinross was also staying. Joan sent her letters there. Her first was headed ‘Grand Café de Paris et de la Poste’ and written from Mende, a small town in Lozère.
I do miss you horribly – everything nice I see, eat, drink I wish you were here to share it. Lys is not here – for various good reasons she has gone back to London, & of course it is far nicer as it is, in a way. I was a little worried at first after all our talk, but I manage to keep my platonic travelling companion status with no difficulty; in which as you know I take great pride. And that tiresome old meddler Groddeck* has made me have the curse a week late for nothing [. . .]
Now today, after an entire morning waiting for a train to go, we are in the first lovely town; squares, plane trees, cafés, fountains & thin grey semi-circular slate tiles, in heavenly country of small rivers, gorges & almost rounded hills; & this afternoon after a little sightseeing, we go to La Malène on the Tarn and start on the Gorges de Tarn. The end of next week our address is chez Madame Riley, Chateau de Curemonte,
Corrèze. Everything is a bit slower as we have no car & we shan’t be at Bordeaux until about Friday 20th. Could you meet me there? Cyril is all for it. There are lots of things round there in the way of photographs & drinking but if you don’t want to come I’ll try & hurry everything up as I really don’t enjoy this separation. What about it? it would be heavenly if you did come, but if you think it’s disastrous from the book point of view I shall understand, although there really isn’t all that terrible hurry, is there? It’s only in England one feels this terribly urgent rush. I hope I hear from you at Roquefort but please, please don’t say anything nasty as I couldn’t have it. I think every day that an island or mountain in Greece is the only place for us.
C. is being very sweet & easy & is heavenly to travel with. He really is hoping you come to Bordeaux & says we can all go to Ch. Mouton Rothschild when you arrive (as an inducement).
I do hope, my darling angel, you are having a happy time. Give my greatest love to Amy & Smarty – I am longing to be there. I hope you are not staying with some horrible femme du boulanger & darling, darling Paddy I am longing to see you again. I’ve taken lots of photographs but it’s been so far very difficult country & I have little confidence in the new camera. It should be better photogenically from now on.
Bless you my angel
All my love
Joan
Don’t get worried about jobs and things. It’s only in England one has to spend so much & I’m sure I can never live there. Forgive this untidy after-luncheon letter. Cyril sends love!23
A week later Joan wrote again to Paddy from the Château de Curemonte in Corrèze. She was staying with Peggy Riley, the European features editor of American Vogue. The previous year Cyril had met and entertained Peggy and she had invited him to stay with her in France. He had arrived at the chateau for the weekend and then, after a day or two, he said he had to meet a photographer on business. He reappeared with Joan. The weekend Cyril was supposed to stay turned into three weeks, and Joan was invited to stay too. She wrote:
This is the most heavenly place & I long for you to be here – it is everything you like. The house is small but built within the ruins of the old castle at the top of a very hand-knitted little village full of bearded women in fierce black shiny hats. Everywhere there is the most lovely view – wide rolling wooded hills, green lawn like fields, rows of flickering poplars, all very calm and happy. Today is boilingly hot and I am writing in the garden. No-one else is up although it is 12 o’clock. Soon I hope Peggy Riley will emerge with drinks and foie gras. She is extremely wise and you would adore her.* She is living here for 3 months with her lover, Georges Bernier, an ugly charming French intellectual of the best unboring French sort, a great gourmet . . . We have lovely conversations, arguments, discussions all day long & I seem to have talked more here than for the last two years and I wish, wish, wish you were here too. Incidentally the house belongs to the daughter of Collette, les mêmes moeurs as her mother and is full of sexy Lesbian books & pictures of snakes.
*Has lived for years in Mexico & sings lots of songs including Virgen de Guadaloupe. Aïe. Aïe. Aïe!
Unfortunately, the week before their arrival had been a disaster. Cyril had exercised to the full his talent for making life complicated both for himself and for those around him. Having been more or less in love with Joan for years, he had made his feelings about her all too obvious and had made a pass at her. A week alone with her had been too much of a temptation.
The only blot on all this (& this, my darling, is for your ears alone) is that things are getting a bit strained – why do these complications have to spoil things so often? I feel like a boringly monogamous bourgeois bitch but I can’t do anything about it. It seems so easy to make everyone happy but I can’t, and I’m getting very nervous & we will probably end up bitter enemies**. It’s not really as bad as all that but I feel gloomy & annoyed about it all & feel I should manage better than I do. Actually I think everything will be all right & I’m making a lot of fuss about nothing. Please don’t let Patrick or Amy get hold of this letter – I can’t imagine two worse people! Tear it up. We are staying here till Friday – they have a car and we drive about every afternoon & evening photographing & sightseeing, & then go to Bordeaux. I’m afraid now if you come there it will be rather hell for C., I couldn’t disguise my joy at seeing you, as much as I should like it, unless you very much want to, it would be better not to come . . .
Darling, what an incoherent muddled letter – worse than usual – but I haven’t much time to write & all the plans are vague & the sun is very hot & the Larousse Gastronomique, on which I write, is slipping on my knees.
Darling darling Paddy I do love you so.
A huge great hug.
Joan.
**No this not true. C is sweet but sad.24
In Happy Deathbeds, Connolly’s unfinished novel from that time, Joan appears as ‘Jane Sotheran’.
She had long legs, long ankles, toes like a Greek goddess, a neck that looked as if it had been artificially lengthened to support a princess’s dowry of gold curtain rings and a face whose chief features were two enormous eyes of clouded violet blue, usually concealed behind dark glasses, a small fine nose, a slightly protruding lower lip, wrinkled brow and pelt of short blonde hair.25
Connolly had also told his mother that he wanted to marry Joan after her marriage with John Rayner had ended. He believed that she was the only person who could have helped him get over his first wife Jean – ‘this Joan to end all Jeans’. Inconveniently, however, Joan was always away somewhere abroad because of the war and then in the Caribbean. During the week before Joan’s letter he had been able to indulge his fantasies about her again, as she wandered beside him in her ‘dark green cardigan and grey trousers, her camera slung over her shoulder and her golden hair bobbing as she walks, always a little fairer than you think, like the wind in a stubble field’. Although to please him Joan agreed to take part in a pretend wedding in a cave, during which they were interrupted by a party of boy scouts and some falling rocks, she had tired of being Cyril’s ‘lovely boy-girl . . . like a casual, loving, decadent Eton athlete’.26
Meanwhile, impervious to the upset he had caused Joan, Connolly spent his mornings in bed with maps and Guides Bleus working out ways in which Peggy and Bernier, who had a car, might entertain him. The trip to France eventually ended at La Rochelle, where Joan caught the train to Paris in order to meet Paddy. All that exists to show from the jaunt are a couple of envelopes of Joan’s photographs: Cyril never wrote a line of his projected book on France for Hamish Hamilton, nor did he return his generous advance on his expenses.
10
Separation
After he left Gadencourt, Paddy spent a week in Paris with Joan, then, without making any advance arrangement, he took a bus to the Abbey of St Wandrille de Fontanelle in the Lower Seine. The relative seclusion of Gadencourt had helped him to write and he was making significant progress with the book. As somewhere quiet and cheap, a monastery seemed another ideal place to stay. For Joan, however, this meant further separation from Paddy, and she returned to London in order to look for somewhere to live. She had still not decided whether she wanted to live in London or in the country, and she clearly hated the search. A greater problem, though, was that Joan was desperate to have a family. In post-war Britain it was regarded as almost a woman’s patriotic duty to have children; it was also her own experience of life. Joan had been brought up in a large, extended family and her two sisters had seven children between them. She was thirty-six when she returned from the Caribbean, and conscious that her chances of having a baby were receding. Prolonged separations from Paddy meant that opportunities for sexual contact with him were few. He had made Denise Menasce pregnant – all too easily – and Joan wondered if it was her own fault that she seemed to be unable to become pregnant too.
The June 1948 issue of Horizon had included an article by Lawrence Durrell, who was an enthusiast for the teachings of the German phys
ician Georg Groddeck. Groddeck, a proponent of psychosomatic medicine, taught that problems of health and disease were forms of self-expression. For someone so self-aware and so self-critical as Joan, such theories were tempting, as shown by her letter from Mende. Treatment could be effected, he suggested, by psychoanalysis, hot baths and massage. However, such therapy by ‘that tiresome old meddler’ proved fruitless for her. In her letters to Paddy, Joan wrote frequently about her desire for babies but her remarks brought no response. Paddy’s only comment was unsympathetic and flippant – ‘felt frightfully ill. It must have been Groddeck’ – before going on to ‘a wonderful party’.
For most of the months between August and December, and again for weeks on end while Paddy was in France, Joan and he were separated from one another. Writing The Traveller’s Tree in order to make money and turn Paddy into a recognized author had to come first. They wrote affectionately to one another and Paddy’s letters to Joan from the monasteries of St Wandrille and Solesmes later provided a framework for much of A Time to Keep Silence, his study of monasticism which was first published in book form in 1957. He writes to her as ‘Angel’, ‘Mopsa’, ‘Pet’, ‘little mite’, ‘my tiny muskin’, and the pages are embellished with pictures of little mice. Again and again Joan says how much she misses him. At the end of one of her letters she too drew a mouse but one with long-lashed eyes and blood dripping from its bleeding heart. Sometimes she enclosed ‘Ds’ or ‘Benzers’ – the drug Benzedrine, widely used at the time as a stimulant. There are many references to Cyril, or ‘the H’ or ‘the Humanist’, as Paddy and Joan called him, and his hopeless pursuit of Joan. Cyril wanted Joan to return to France to take more photographs but unfortunately, as Joan wrote to Paddy, his interest in her was more than just professional. In his letters Paddy comes across as both possessive and playful, anxious that in his absence Joan might find another lover. Joan too was sometimes afraid that she would not see Paddy again. Neither had anything to fear.