The Lost Girls

by D. J. Taylor

  Here in early 1940, most of this lay in the future. Meanwhile, for all his newfound celebrity as the impresario of a successful literary magazine, Connolly’s personal life was, once again, in tatters. A man newly reconciled with a wife who had spent much of the previous year living apart from him might have thought twice about employing his mistress in the office where both of them worked, but sometime in the spring Diana – now adjudged to have recovered from her injuries – took up residence behind a desk at Lansdowne Terrace. Most of her work involved appraising manuscripts according to the approved Connolly code – ‘no good at all’, ‘doubtful’, ‘good’ and ‘outstanding’. Although Jean had disappeared to stay with friends at Malvern Wells – Connolly seems to have left Yeoman’s Row to stay at a hotel in Charlotte Street – there were, as yet, no indications that she meant to leave him for good. Judging from the letter in which she proposes a triangular arrangement (‘Why don’t you and Diana take a cottage in the country and I’ll come and stay and we’ll all be high-minded and Bloomsbury and the best of friends’), she was still trying to make the best of a bad situation. Not long afterwards she made a new will in which Connolly featured as sole legatee and indicated that she wanted to give him half her annual income for the rest of her days. But the shades were drawing in around Connolly’s married life, and in June she left for Dublin (‘It is beginning to sink in how very far I am going and for how very long’) and then for America. Even here, though, Connolly’s powerful magic still worked its effect. ‘Darling, darling heart, don’t grieve,’ runs her valedictory letter. ‘I love you and will write you every week and will come back to you.’

  Horizon, too, was on the move, a casualty of events taking place across the Channel. Hitler’s assault on France began in the second week of May 1940; by 14 June, a fortnight after the British Expeditionary Force’s retreat to Dunkirk, there were Nazi troops in Paris. As the fear of invasion grew, Peter Watson decided to lease a house at Thurlestone Sands on the south Devon coast where he, Connolly, Diana and Spender could conduct the magazine’s business far away from the threat of war in the comfort of remote, provincial England. Despite the attractions of a hired car and a live-in cook, the relocation was not a success. Connolly spent most of what was intended as a working holiday sulking in his room and complaining about the lack of things to eat and the general inconvenience of being detached from his professional beat. Early in August, Watson informed his friend Cecil Beaton that ‘on the 16th the lease is up and HORIZON may move to a famous tropical garden near Dartmouth’, but this seems to have been ironic: clearly his editor pined to be back in London, and by the end of that month the editorial team were back in Spender’s flat at Lansdowne Terrace.

  Connolly, who would otherwise have been homeless, took a furnished apartment high up in Athenaeum Court, Piccadilly, an address so exclusive – Watson lived in the same block – that it was assumed that his patron was paying the rent. It was a time when the realities of war, generally evaded in Horizon’s guilt-ridden editorials, became sharply apparent. The London Blitz began on 7 September, watched by Connolly, Orwell and their friend Hugh Slater, from the Piccadilly eyrie. Lansdowne Terrace was hit (‘Our office has been bombed and we have been without telephone for three weeks, but we are carrying on’, Watson told Beaton.) And then, just as the bombs began to fall, Connolly’s emotional life was plunged once more into crisis. Diana, still smarting from the unpleasantness of Thurlestone Sands, resolved to go on holiday on her own. As ever, when threatened by a disturbance in his personal circumstances, Connolly did all he could to forestall it. Threats of suicide; dire warnings of the likely effect of abandonment on his creative powers; interventions from mutual friends: all these were tried and failed. Alone in the furnished room at Athenaeum Court, Connolly was forced to face up to the regrettable fact that both wife and mistress had thrown him over in the space of three months.

  It was at this point that the circles in which Connolly and Lys moved began to overlap. The Lubbocks knew Spender. They were also friends with a young student of the Royal College of Music named Natasha Litvin. The Lubbocks’ flat in Great Ormond Street boasted a grand piano, to which Natasha was allowed access. One Friday towards the end of August, at almost exactly the same time that Connolly returned from the west country, Tony Hyndman, the bisexual Spender’s former boyfriend, dropped by to invite the Lubbocks to lunch on the following day. After some persuasion at the hands of the voluble Hyndman (‘Oh come on ducky, you’ll love it’), Natasha decided to join the party at Lansdowne Terrace. Here her innocent eye fell ‘wonderingly’ on the various possessions that Spender had left lying around the office, the small Picasso that hung on the wall, the outsize gramophone, the shiny ebony desk, the records in their sleeves. Ian Lubbock introduced her to Spender, and the evening ended with the pair of them having dinner in a nearby Italian restaurant. Natasha, as she readily conceded, had ‘never met people like this before’. The experience was that of being admitted into ‘a totally new life’.

  Meanwhile, two other people were heading rapidly down the same route. If Connolly and Lys did not meet at Spender’s party, then they were introduced to each other shortly afterwards. Certainly, they were on the way to becoming an item by the autumn of 1940, by which time Lys and her husband had moved to a flat in Holland Park. A letter from her around this time brings news of domestic tension (‘Ian has been shouting & screaming at me all morning’), canvasses a scheme for Connolly to get her a job on Horizon, offers him lodgings while the Lubbocks are away and hatches a plan for a rendezvous: ‘I could have lunch with you tomorrow – if you would like that.’ ‘Everything seems to be so hopeless darling,’ Lys lamented, ‘but perhaps when I get back we shall have come to some decision.’ Clearly husband and wife agreed to separate, for when, in the early part of 1941, Connolly moved into a studio flat at Drayton Gardens, SW10, rented from Celia and Mamaine Paget (‘I have the Paget twins’ house’, he grandly informed Alan Pryce-Jones), Lys came with him.

  What was Lys like, and what, aside from her startling good looks, did Connolly find to admire in her? The most obvious answer is that she admired him. (‘People say she is dull,’ Connolly is once supposed to have remarked about a woman he was pursuing, ‘but she is interested in yours truly, and that is what yours truly likes.’) At the same time, it takes only a glance at Lys’s letters to establish the allure of her personality. Lively, affectionate and dutiful, she was, and continued to remain, a magnet for the opposite sex. Men fell in love with her almost on the spot: years later Connolly can be found complaining about the entourage of male admirers he (wrongly) imagined her to be encouraging. There were complaints about her tendency to prattle and her ‘silliness’, but her occasional gaucheness seems to have stemmed from an anxiety to please, a deference to the interests of the people around her that, in a world of super-egos and male peacocking, strikes an odd note of humility.

  What did the parties to this transaction want from it? Connolly, fresh from his dealings with Jean and Diana, seems to have been fascinated by the regard of an exceedingly pretty woman who not only admired his intellectual brilliance but appeared happy to organise his somewhat chaotic domestic life. Lys, it is fair to say, saw something that her marriage to Ian Lubbock had apparently lacked: a future, a man she respected and for whom she pined to create an environment in which he could feel at home. And so the revolution in Connolly’s existence that took place at the end of 1940 was as much administrative as emotional. Lys cooked for him, she arranged luncheons for his friends and relatives, she hired an accountant to explore his complicated finances, did calculations on his behalf and, by submitting details of his entertaining expenses to the Inland Revenue, seems to have ensured that he paid virtually no income tax. The end in view, as she was happy to admit, was a settled relationship, leading to marriage. But this, as she also conceded, was always likely to be complicated by the emotional turmoil that Connolly liked to create around himself.

  As soon as Cyril decided he wanted somethi
ng, he wouldn’t rest until he had it. And he was very good at making you feel guilty for not giving him what he wanted. Like a child, he would beg and beg, and then when you gave in, his attention would go to another thing. Sometimes I think he only really loved me when he thought he was losing me. There were endless scenes.

  It was inevitable that some of Lys’s organisational skills should be brought to bear on the tangled and resolutely ad hoc arrangements of the Horizon office. Until now, most of the routine administrative work had been carried out by a floating population of part-time staff. Bill Makins, the original business manager, had disappeared into the army. At various times over the first year-and-a-half of the magazine’s existence, secretarial duties had been performed by Diana, a ‘Miss Warren’, a woman called Liza Mann and a young man barely out of his teens named Michael Nelson. Janetta occasionally helped out and appeared at parties. Far more experienced in the realities of office life than her predecessors, Lys not only brought her managerial skills to the environment in which Connolly conducted his professional life but doubled up as his social secretary. When Spender and Natasha decided to get married in the spring of 1941, the wedding party was held at Drayton Gardens under her supervision.

  Tolerant of Connolly’s foibles, anxious to make the paths he trod run smooth, ever humble and almost infinitely pliable, Lys was prepared to put up with a great deal, in particular the expansion of the Drayton Gardens ménage to include the free-loading Quennell, who had previously been lodging at the flat in Holland Park, and Connolly’s protégé Arthur Koestler, a deserter from the French Foreign Legion who had arrived in England after a torturous escape from North Africa and then joined, and been discharged from, the Pioneer Corps. Although there was plenty of space, the premises harboured only a single bathroom. Each morning, with the late-rising Connolly still fast asleep, Lys looked on with amusement as Quennell and Koestler contended for the first bath.

  The Drayton Gardens lease expired early in 1942; it was Lys who found a new flat for Connolly at 49 Bedford Square, with a spacious drawing room for entertaining and an attic where the ever adaptable Quennell swiftly established himself. Here and there in the diaries and letters kept by the literary figures of the 1940s come glimpses of their domestic life together. One visitor who warmly approved of Lys was Evelyn Waugh, not least for her ability to overcome the sumptuary privations of the war. ‘On Friday I lunched with Christopher and Camilla [Sykes] and dined with Cyril Connolly,’ runs a letter to his wife Laura from September 1943. ‘His mistress loves me still. Nancy there too. Truffles and lobsters.’ Six months later he could be found telling Lady Dorothy Lygon that ‘Cyril Connolly and his delightful mistress give dinner parties which I enjoy very much but it always means walking home from Bloomsbury’. The man in the attic was more circumspect, amused by Connolly’s airs and finding his companion slightly irritating. A site report from early September 1943 notes that ‘at Bedford Square existence is still fairly tranquil: but Cyril is at his most sensitive and Lys – in the role of The Mouse at Bay or Battling Minnie – has been getting slightly on my nerves’. The sharp-eyed Quennell also detected in Connolly a growing sense of his own importance, a determination to live in a way commensurate with his status as an arts-world power-broker: ‘Cyril and Lys continue to live a life of conjugal sybaritism, getting up at 12 and entertaining large parties of the intelligentsia, with a slight vanilla flavouring of the nobility and gentry.’

  As ever, Connolly’s state of mind in the war years oscillated wildly. On the one hand, his star was in the ascendant. The move from Drayton Gardens to the comparative splendour of Bloomsbury seemed to symbolise his newfound status. (‘Cyril . . . has taken an enormous flat in Bedford Sq. and is very much on the up-grade’, Diana informed her brother.) But however much he enjoyed the benefits of being the editor of a highly regarded literary magazine, he was also restless, dissatisfied with his lot and looking out for fresh opportunities. One promising new sideline came his way early in 1942, when his friend David Astor, proprietor of the Observer, appointed him as the paper’s literary editor. The salary was £800 a year and the duties minimal, but Connolly’s time in Fleet Street was not a success. There were rows with the Observer’s editor, Ivor Brown, and an eventual falling out with Astor, who thought the books pages too abstruse and was annoyed by Connolly’s habit of criticising him behind his back.

  Worse, the end of his Observer contract in the summer of 1943 was immediately followed by his fortieth birthday. Connolly took the anniversary hard: a symbol of lost youth; an impenetrable barrier separating him from the consolations of the past. The Unquiet Grave, the manuscript on which he was currently at work, a selection of pensées infused with the elegiac note of classical myth, is a kind of casebook of accidie, full of inner disquiet and intensely realised longing for days gone by. Years later, Lys would tell him that the only time she had seen him ‘completely happy’ was when he was working on it. Simultaneously, the days passing by the window at Bedford Square were full of danger. ‘This, as you’ve probably read in the papers, is SECRET WEAPON WEEK,’ Quennell told one of his correspondents in June 1944. ‘Pilotless planes whizz over the house-tops.’ While Quennell affected to be relatively unmoved by the sight of a V1 hurtling over the London rooftops (‘It just goes bowling thro’ the sky, explodes and there you are’), he reported that Connolly and Lys (‘exceedingly buzz-bomb conscious’) took refuge in a shelter they had constructed beneath the stairs. The slimline Lys ‘fits in as neatly as a maggot into a pea-pod’; her overweight consort, on the other hand, reminded him of a large rabbit trying to squeeze into a rathole.

  If Lys was not always on hand in the Horizon office – she was called up for war work in 1942 and spent nearly two years working as a secretary in the Political Intelligence Department – then she was a constant presence in Connolly’s life, dealing with his affairs, presiding over his entertainments and, it has to be said, running his bathwater and cooking his breakfast. Three years into their relationship, it was still her ambition to marry him, and yet if this feat were to be accomplished, several outsize hurdles had still to be negotiated. One of them was legal, for at this stage in the proceedings both editor and consort were married to somebody else. The other was Connolly’s inertia, his deep-seated reluctance to be persuaded into a decisive step, and the obvious satisfaction he got from letting things drift. Some progress was made in 1944 when Lys secured a divorce from Ian Lubbock (Connolly was named as the co-respondent), while Connolly went so far as to inform Jean that unless she returned to England or said that she intended to he would institute proceedings himself, but the turn of the year offered two highly symbolic instances of the way in which Connolly regarded his long-term girlfriend and the role she might play in his complicated existence.

  The first was publication of The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus, brought out in a limited edition of 1000 copies under Horizon’s own imprint before being reissued by Hamish Hamilton. ‘Palinurus’ was the pilot of classical mythology, appointed by Aeneas on his voyage from Troy to Italy, who fell asleep, was swept ashore and murdered by savages. His body was left unburied, and when Aeneas visited the underworld he was petitioned for formal interment by his shade. Lys had helped to type Connolly’s manuscript, and yet at least one of his friends interpreted the project as little more than a long-drawn out complaint about the world he now inhabited: ‘half commonplace book of French maxims, half a lament for his life,’ Evelyn Waugh suggested. ‘Poor Lys; he sees her as the embodiment of the blackout and air raids and rationing.’

  The second instance was Connolly’s trip to post-war Paris, undertaken alone, in which he seems to have been treated as a paladin of English literature hastening back to salute the culture he had been compelled to forsake during the four years of Nazi occupation. (‘We’ve had C. Conelly [sic] for three weeks in the house,’ Lady Diana Cooper, the wife of the British Ambassador, reported back to Waugh, ‘being feted as though he were Voltaire returned.’)

  It would
have been scant consolation for Lys to be asked to reassure Peter Watson that he was missing nothing – ‘it is not the Paris we knew but an unreal city’ – for most of his friends suspected that he had been vastly enjoying himself: his letter to Lys, as Diana pointed out to Janetta, ‘sounded as though he’d had the most wonderful time’. Neither, perhaps, would Lys have been impressed by news of Connolly’s recantation of his original view and a wholesale surrender to the delights of French literary life that led to the entire July 1945 number being filled with contributions relating to Sartre, Valéry and other manifestations of French genius. Most ominous of all was an observation that she never got to see – a line in a letter that Quennell, still vigilant in the Bedford Square attic, confided to a friend in November 1944. Connolly, he adjudged, ‘is, I fancy pretty bored – but not so bored as to wish to put out onto the wide dark seas of a new adventure’. For Lys, who fussed over his wardrobe, who organised Connolly’s parties and haggled for black-market food to delight his friends, the next few years would bring only stasis, frustration and ever diminishing returns.