Photography, for Joan, was always a means to an end, preferably that of making an income, so she felt obliged to take whatever work came her way. In January 1952 she was offered an assignment in Ireland to take pictures for the Economic Cooperation Administration, the agency set up to implement the American Marshall Plan, which provided aid for the rehabilitation of post-war Europe. The project was going to pay her £200, money she regarded as useful, but in every other way the work lacked any job satisfaction whatsoever, let alone aesthetic gratification. After her arrival in Ireland, she wrote to Paddy from the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin.
My darling Paddy
What I am doing here, God knows. Nobody else does, apparently. How I wish you were here which you could have been, and then it would have been great fun. But as it is I am gloomy without you & it’s no good trying to be alone in a town. I expected to be whisked off by my reporter at once but nothing seems to be arranged at all & I shall linger here for days. Derek Jackson asked me to stay for the week-end but it seems too complicated to arrange & I shall probably stay with Cracky Wicklow for Sunday. I was met at the aerodrome by Mr. Taft’s large car – he seems very nice, tall, gangling, spectacled, entirely uninteresting & unattractive & not Mr. Right (or Wrong, for that matter). The same goes for the reporter Mr Brown. (NOT a drink even from either of them.) After long, pointless conversations & buying films etc. it was too dark to see much of Dublin but what I did see looked too lovely – Everyone talks with an Irish brogue too – I thought they only did that on the stage now – and is charming in shops etc. I had a room booked (small but a bath) in the grand hotel & was rather pleased to go to bed early. Of course the one thing I long for is your guide book – in fact I spent hours looking for a second hand book shop with one like it – no good of course – what a lunatic I am.
I spent all today photographing a drain being laid in a bog in a thick mist, & was driven about by Mr. Taft’s fat Irish chauffeur who insisted on giving me a huge glass of whisky at every pub we passed with lots of winks & nudges in the ribs – I hope he’s not going to get more familiar. We had lunch together in the back of a draper’s store – tea and tinned salmon – & when we got home tonight he presented me with a quarter bottle of whisky to drink when I went to bed! Tomorrow I spend the day with Mr. Taft, a poultry farm first & then a place called Trim (oh for the guide book) where there are some ruins & a nice priest apparently whom he wants me to snap though what that has to do with ECA I don’t know – it looks as though there is an ECA boat coming in then & they want pictures of it unloading. I don’t know yet about Paris – if I have to go for money & photograph reasons it will save trouble to go from here but I shall only stay a few days so should be back anyway in England the beginning of the week after next – about the 6th. Do please give me the Abbé’s address in case I go.
Darling sweet Paddy I do wish you were here –
All my love
Joan6
Paddy’s reply came from Kent. He thanked Joan for her ‘heavenly’ letter – Paddy’s language was typically effusive. ‘Dear little muskin, what fun Ireland sounds. I’m reassured about Mr Taft and the ECA newshawk. I hope all your acquaintances achieved the same satisfactory level of dowdiness and non-glamour – though I suppose I ought to wish you the reverse under our new pact of liberty. But I can’t quite manage that yet. The whisky swilling driver sounds heaven.’7 The ‘pact of liberty’ implies that Paddy and Joan now had an agreement where each could take lovers should they wish, although this agreement had yet to be tested. In his letter, Paddy went on to say that he had just finished Patrick Kinross’s latest book when the telephone rang, and a female voice asked for Joan. ‘It turned out to be Angela ex-K. [ex-Kinross], asking you and me to a party that evening. I went, of course, and wish you’d been there, because there were Patrick and Angela laughing away in front of the fire with their arms interlocked like the most inseparable friends. It was a problem to know whether to press her hand in silent commiseration or to wring Patrick’s in congratulation.’ While Paddy and Joan had just made an arrangement for an open relationship, Angela – for whom no marriage had ever been closed – was, as ever, in between lovers.
One of her future lovers was the same Derek Jackson that Joan had been trying to meet in Dublin. Jackson was a brilliant physicist who was able to fund his own research into spectroscopy from his considerable personal wealth. During the war he had been made chief airborne radar officer of Bomber Command. In all he flew 1,100 hours on active service and was subsequently awarded an OBE for valour. However, being by disposition fiercely independent, in 1943 he offered his home in Oxfordshire to his brother-and sister-in-law – Sir Oswald and Diana Mosley – on their release from internment. Diana Mosley was the sister of Jackson’s wife, Pamela Mitford. In 1947, Jackson moved to Ireland to avoid what he saw as the punitive taxation imposed by Clement Attlee’s incoming government. In 1951, his marriage to Pamela dissolved, he married Janetta Kee – the former wife of the journalist Robert Kee – but left her, too, to live in Paris with Janetta’s half-sister, Angela Culme-Seymour.
Joan wrote again from Shelton Abbey a few days after her first letter to Paddy. The Abbey was the home of ‘Cracky’ Clonmore, the 8th Earl of Wicklow, a jovial Catholic convert as well as an old Oxford friend of John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh. It was the Abbey, Betjeman claimed, which had made him interested in Gothic revival architecture.
Darling Moleskie Paddakimou
Thank you for your sweet telegram. I do wish you were here – I seem to have got stuck in Ireland now but really am dying to leave. The trouble is that planes go direct to Paris on Weds & Sats only – couldn’t catch last Wednesday & then longed to come here (Shelton Abbey) to stay with Cracky Wicklow so now shall have to leave Wednesday – I’m sick of Dublin but luckily Derek Jackson will be there on Monday & I shall be able to have a rich meal with him. I stayed with them last weekend after all (this is their writing paper) & it was quiet & pleasant. Then all the week I’ve been photographing bogs, peat moss, factories & nearly going off my head with the horror of it all. It’s the last time I do anything like this. Luckily Mr Brown the reporter (whom I’ve only been out with 3 days) dislikes the whole thing as much as I do & we drink a lot of whisky to get through the day.
I’ve had some good meals in Dublin & been to the Abbey Theatre & a nice music hall with Cracky – The Abbey[ Theatre] so boring – a modern Irish small town comedy – that we left after one act. Do you know Henry Clifton? He is in Dublin, raving & nearly dangerous, but luckily seems to be bedridden at the moment. He sends me flowers and telephones me at 8 in the morning spiritual messages.
This is a wonderful house – Strawberry Hill Gothick – enormous – which Cracky turned into a hotel about 2 years ago when his father died, to be able to keep it up. Freezingly cold at the moment as no central heating but nice fires everywhere.
I’ll see you at the end of the week or the beginning of next, I pray – it does seem a long time somehow – please don’t disappear altogether, my darling.
Best love & hugs & kisses xxx xxx8
Among Joan’s Irish photographs there are pictures of a couple of country houses which have fallen on hard times, a drainage works and a woman driving a pig along a street. Shortly after her stay the hotel failed; Cracky was declared bankrupt and moved to a flat in Dublin. Shelton Abbey and its contents were sold, and the Irish state turned the Strawberry Hill Gothick masterpiece into an open prison.
If she was in London by herself without any plans for the evening Joan would go round to Graham’s house, play the gramophone, and drink his excellent hock – Graham prided himself on his knowledge of white wine. Since Paddy was so often travelling – as if to stay in one place too long was some kind of psychological impossibility – Joan’s visits to Graham were likely to have been frequent. On many other evenings, however, there was a cocktail party or a dinner party to attend and her letters to Paddy include lists of fellow guests and who she saw or what she talked about:
Annie [Fleming] is about to leave for Jamaica. She had a nice small supper party last weekend after Freddie’s [Frederick Ashton] two new ballets on Thursday; Lucian [Freud], Pandora Jones, Ann Norwich’s sister who he appears to be having an affair with while Caroline is still in Ireland, Margot [Fonteyn], Fred, a few of the ballet, Willie Walton, Evelyn Waugh who I talked to most of the time, mostly about the time he went mad & all his voices – fascinating.9
She apologized for gossiping, but Paddy’s letters to Joan also included similar lists. However much they wanted peace and silence, both were social creatures, and although self-effacing, Joan enjoyed good company.
Often her evenings ended up in the Gargoyle Club in Dean Street – the heart of Soho – which was only a short walk away now that she was living in Charlotte Street. Entry to the Gargoyle, which had been opened at great expense in the 1920s by David Tennant, was by a rickety lift no bigger than a telephone box. The lift led to a bar, a coffee room and a drawing room, and then, down a rather precarious staircase, there was a ballroom. The band was not very good, but it played continually and with enthusiasm tunes like ‘Bye-bye Blackbird’ or ‘Melancholy Baby’. Membership cost three guineas, but if you were penniless you could probably get in for free, and no one minded what anyone wore: what mattered was that you were interesting. The Gargoyle was a resort of artists, writers and their friends, and the atmosphere was distinctly raffish. It had been decorated by Matisse, who had covered the walls with fragments of eighteenth-century mirrors and hung two of his own paintings. ‘There used to be something marvellous about the Gargoyle,’ Francis Bacon said.
When people came down the staircase the broken mirrors made them look like birds of paradise. The Gargoyle was a place where people could let their hair down, and it was famous for its rows. It was a place made for rows, and some of the members would come back every evening to continue their row or to listen to someone else’s. Of course the rows were usually to do with unhappy love affairs, and what is more fascinating for onlookers than what’s called other people’s unhappy love affairs?10
As Joan wrote:
I went to the Gargoyle Club several times, of course, & now never want to go again. David [Tennant] very drunk, Pauline [Tennant] having a tremendous affair with Micky Luke*, Julian Baines with a black eye Natalie had given him for talking to Pauline, Ann Dunn tearing Sally Newton’s hair & eyes out because she was talking to Cyril & having her dress torn off by Mr Blackburn – all very much the same, but enjoyable, as I was with Graham one night, then Barbara and Rex [Warner], & Jeremy for one moment, & then the next night with Peter Q. I saw Xan & he seemed quite well.11
Francis Bacon was a new friend – Paddy always sent him his books in the years to come. In the spring of 1950, Paddy had gone to Portugal and, only an hour after his arrival, he found himself in a wine shop off one of the minor squares of Lisbon – ‘an atmosphere, sympa (as they say), and promising’, where he started drafting a letter to Joan. The evening before his departure from Liverpool, he had been drinking brandy in David Tennant’s flat with Philip Toynbee, Derek Jackson and Francis Bacon. Paddy began to draft a letter to Joan in his notebook:
David was entirely un-boring and informative about Spain, we were all rather drunk. Derek and Francis exchanged pecks between drinks like two bullfinches in a cage. It was rather sweet, and utterly un-rebarbative. Derek (all of us drunk) [After this the conversation must have turned more intimate and personal, for Paddy has heavily crossed through some of the lines which follow. From what one can make out Derek seems to have told Paddy that he found Joan very attractive . . .]
(So different from your smarmy-hostile humanist). I said of course I understood, and I do. You can’t own somebody. And, my darling, your minor-planetary beams are not the fault of you, or of the fellow stars they illuminate, and turn into satellites – anyway, the mists and monsoons and upheavals are only for the closest of them, the ones in the position to see the mutual craters and deserts and blank stellar cordilleras. I see yours as plainly as you see mine, and love you very much.12
Bacon also met Isabel Delmer at the Gargoyle. Isabel’s relationship with Giacometti had only lasted a few months, and she had returned from Paris to London. She and Giacometti remained friends, and she introduced him to Bacon – he was one of the few living artists Bacon would admit to admiring. Isabel became part of Bacon’s close circle and he painted her often. Like other artists before her, he found her an excellent model and, in his work, she became one of the twisting, screaming, tormented figures pressed up against the glass which he painted; contorted images of a former lover which, as it happened, John Rayner always hated. Isabel and Francis even tried having sex together but, predictably, this was a failure. Aged thirty-five and looking around for another husband among her circle of friends, in late 1946 she met Constant Lambert in Paris – she had been introduced to him at Sadler’s Wells by John Rayner. He had been having an affair with Margot Fonteyn, but the following October he married Isabel. Fonteyn was on tour when she found out – and, later, rarely spoke about her past relationship. Years afterwards Isabel said, ‘Constant thought if he married me I would bring him back to life. His friends thought so too. He was a sad man and a sick man. He had been a public figure since a very young man, had acquaintances of all kinds, only few close friends.’13 But it was too late to save him from himself. ‘Constant is back on the bottle and is an intolerable bore. I think poor I. is getting quite fed up although she behaves angelically towards him,’14 Joan wrote to Paddy. Constant Lambert died in August 1951, two days before his forty-sixth birthday, an ill and prematurely aged man.
By the late 1940s, Cyril Connolly had fallen out of love with Lys Lubbock and was looking around for someone new. He became besotted with a young painter called Anne Dunn, but in 1950 she married Michael Wishart, another artist (the party for the wedding took place in Francis Bacon’s studio and lasted two days and three nights: ‘I was immensely drunk, and I found myself reclining in a pool of vomit,’ wrote Paddy). However, around the same time Barbara Skelton re-entered his life. During the war, at the suggestion of Donald Maclean, she had been a cipher clerk in Cairo; King Farouk had been a lover and used to whip her with his dressing-gown cord. ‘One glance explained the abundant notches in her tomahawk,’ wrote Wishart, with whom she also had an affair. ‘As feline in appearance as she later proved in character, she had a tantalising quality of needing a tamer, while something indefinable about her suggested she was untameable.’15
The relationship between Connolly and Barbara, or ‘Baby’, as she was known, was often unhappy but always eventful and, as an intimate of Cyril, Joan kept Paddy informed about the convolutions of the affair. In July 1950, before they had started living together, Barbara wrote in her diary that Cyril had rung her early in the morning to say that he had spent the greater part of the night allotting marks to all the women of his circus, according to their suitability as wives. ‘I, of course, got fewer than any of them for spirituality, but had top score for sex appeal, followed by Sonia Orwell, who had tremendous appeal in a blowsy sort of way when blotto. Lys and Joan got top marks for loyalty and giving him a sense of security.’16 Joan and Barbara were never to get on. Over a couple of pages in her published diaries she complained that Joan ‘groans and sighs’, is ‘grumpy as hell’, ‘gets whiney’, ‘looks cross’. In the photograph of Joan she used for the book, Joan is on her knees with her bottom in the air and her back to the camera.
In October 1950, Cyril and Barbara married in Kent, where Barbara owned a cottage between Canterbury and Folkestone. They had a row in the car on their way home; Barbara was late for a dentist’s appointment. A couple of days later she went into her bedroom to find Cyril staring into space. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked. ‘It’s marriage,’ he answered. ‘I feel trapped.’ In January 1951, Joan invited the couple to a dinner party she was holding for the Berniers in Charlotte Street. Afterwards she wrote to Paddy:
I think they enjoyed it very much, everyone
stayed for ages, nice and tipsy but no one terribly drunk. The last left about five – Robin [Ironside], John Russell and [Denys] Sutton, Derek and Johnny after masses of bacon and eggs and religious conversation. Skelton left before C, the only one not to enjoy it in a furious temper of course, although C could not have been kinder to her, and when he got home about 4 she had locked him out of the flat. It took him about an hour to get in after nearly being arrested, and then apparently he socked her good and proper and slept on the sofa in the sitting room. Robin [Campbell] and I were going to lunch there but C met us at an exhibition in a frightful state, asking us what he was to do, longed to leave but nowhere to go, couldn’t be alone etc, Barbara was still in bed crying so C went home to lunch alone to make up his mind and Robin and I went to Smidts* to join Mary and Donald Maclean.17
Paddy replied from Greece: ‘Poor Cyril, it sounds a bloody life. The more I think of it, the more suitable (in a way) it seems, from Cyril’s Roman Silver Age point of view. There must be a lot in common between Skeltie and Catullus’s Lesbia and Prop.’s Cynthia.’18
At the end of December 1953, the Connollys went to stay at Stokke near Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire, the home of Robin and Mary Campbell, for the New Year. Frances and Ralph Partridge and Janetta Jackson* came over on New Year’s Eve. Afterwards Barbara wrote:
Joan Page 20