by D. J. Taylor
Another reproachful communication sped forth from the Ministry of Economic Warfare, to which Quennell had recently been relocated, on New Year’s Day:
I suppose you’re at cot, dear cot, so frequently profaned, about which I used to feel so romantic!: I imagine you’re there with Grub [the military boyfriend] – exploiting the advantage of his interminable farewell. I wish you would telephone me – if only to say that you are now legally Mrs Grub & never wanted to see me again! In 1943 we must either separate completely or provide our distracting relationship with some sort of settled basis . . . New Year 1943 was not so bad as New Year 1942, but pretty bad all the same & I have this morning a dreadful hangover . . . Do appear soon, darling – even for an Ave atque Vale. . . I hope you had a nice New Year
A bientot
Why do you spend your whole life cutting off your nose to spite your face? It’s far too small a nose to deserve cutting off – & far too pretty a face to be so deliberately & wantonly spoiled . . .
In fact, Barbara had been staying at Topolski’s studio, an unhappy interlude which culminated in a decision to separate herself from him permanently. ‘Parted from Feliks for good two days ago,’ runs a diary entry from early January, ‘and am intending to collect my belongings over the weekend.’ Quennell’s luck turned a day or so later when Barbara telephoned out of the blue and ‘unabashed and apparently affectionate’, agreed to meet him at the Ritz. Quennell arrived to find a phone message cancelling the date. Twenty-four hours later she finally materialised, ‘looking rosy and innocent, with a disarming (if not entirely convincing) story of what she had been up to’. For a week, somewhat to his surprise, Quennell basked in her smiles, though he was careful to remind himself that she ‘can be very difficult’. All this made him reflective, determined once again to work out why he was so smitten with a woman who treated him so capriciously and at times seemed positively to enjoy the experience of making him suffer. Later he would compare himself to Hazlitt in Liber Amoris, outlining his humiliations at the hands of Sarah Walker. Both men, he thought, had ‘suffered ignominious reverses, and both the young women we loved had an inexplicable attraction.’ For the moment, he contented himself with analysing pros and cons, acknowledging that Barbara was extraordinarily quick at detecting her other half’s limitations and exposing his pretensions, while admitting that ‘There is no one I like sleeping with more – or with whom I find it more agreeable to wake up.’
To balance this was Barbara’s fondness for what even the bohemian Quennell reckoned was unsuitable company, her unwavering habit of attracting and sometimes encouraging ‘the unlikeliest devotees; and if they were disreputable, eccentric or perhaps a little grotesque, she found them all the more appealing.’ Worse still, from the point of view of an enraptured swain, was her duplicity and the delight she took in mocking him behind his back. Coming across one of her diaries, he was forced to acknowledge that he was a ‘Chaplinesque figure of fun’. And always, lurking ominously in the margins, was the ‘obstinate spectre’ of Topolski. Somehow the relationship staggered on into February, when Quennell’s diary records ‘Telephonings . . . and again more telephonings’, in which Barbara ‘then proceeded to enlarge on last night’s theme and lucidly explained my role as pis-aller, with some animadversions on defects in my character . . . She has now concentrated against me in a tight knot of resentment and suspicion.’ Once, around this time, they came to blows: ‘the bruise on her nose has spread – giving her a darkly spectacled appearance which is not altogether unattractive’. Then on 5 February she disappeared again. Quennell found himself ‘oddly calm – almost relieved . . . a load seemed to have dropped off. Independence. Clarity.’ Shortly afterwards Barbara rang from Waterloo Station, where she had missed her train, offering ‘plausible excuses and a candid friendly voice’. Why carry on? Quennell wondered. The reason, he decided, lay in his isolation and Barbara’s charm.
By now, as the spring of 1943 drew nearer, there was a suspicion that none of this – the vagrant lifestyle, the multiple love affairs, the daily attendance at the office in Exhibition Road – could be indefinitely sustained, that too many plates had been sent spinning to avoid the smash of shattered crockery. Meanwhile, the levels of complaint continued to rise. ‘Peter irritating beyond belief,’ runs a diary entry from this time. ‘The cold weather makes him terribly snappy. In fact any time now that his life doesn’t run absolutely smoothly he behaves petulantly.’ Inevitably, Quennell’s petulance was increased by Barbara’s frequent disappearances. ‘Barbara Darling!’ begins a letter from mid-April. ‘For the 100th time I feel completely wretched about you . . . Where are you anyhow?’ It was a good question, that probably occurred to her employers at the Yugoslav government in exile: a ramshackle organisation, according to Barbara’s diaries, but one which required basic levels of punctuality from its staff. And so the spring wore on. The letters went back and forth. The meetings were cancelled and rearranged. Finally, there came a day when Barbara arranged to see Quennell at the Ritz. ‘Is baby pleased to see Peter?’ Quennell hopefully enquired. ‘Baby’s been sacked for arriving late at the office every morning for the past two months,’ Barbara shot back.
What was to be done? Where was Barbara to go, and how was she to earn a living? At this juncture a friend who worked at the Foreign Office suggested that she offer her services as a cipher clerk. The promise of foreign travel and warmer climes worked its effect. Her application for a post in the British Embassy in Cairo was accepted. The cottage at Hastingleigh was shut up and left to the care of PC Boot. In June, after a round of emotional farewells, and with a stream of anguished letters following her north, Barbara caught the train to Liverpool and took ship for the Middle East.
Interlude: Glur
At first glance Glur – Joyce Frances Warwick-Evans, in strict baptismal terms – looks like the Lost Girl to end all Lost Girls, a titan of the species in whose effervescing wake lesser competitors tumbled off into obscurity. There are the coruscating good looks, effortlessly reproduced by the society photographers of the day (Angus McBean’s snap from 1938 is so flawless as to make her look almost sinister, with huge and rather startled eyes staring out of a perfectly oval face); there is the chaotic family background (her father jumped ship early on in his marriage, leaving his wife to bring up two small children); there is the string of glamorous marriages (writers, heirs to marquessates, rich young men); the rackety transit through a world where bohemia and the beau monde seemed to collide head-on. One by one, year by year, assignation by assignation, each successive scrap of Lost Girl plumage slides neatly into place.
After this, though, the resemblance to Lys, Sonia, Janetta or Barbara runs into trouble. Unlike her contemporaries, Glur had no ambitions to run a magazine office, marry that elusive great man or go to literary parties. In fact, she had no intellectual pretensions whatever. ‘I thought it would be fun being married to a writer,’ she is supposed to have complained, not long after her first marriage, before adding the fatal caveat, ‘but he’s always writing.’ In some ways Quennell’s ever-roving eye was less of a problem than his obsession with Byron. So what did she want? The answer seems to be that, whether living in Chelsea with Quennell or in the stately seclusion of Savernake Forest with the marquess’s heir, her principal aim was, as her daughter put it, ‘to be the centre of attention’.
As to where the roots of this attention-seeking lie, the strongest candidate is her fractured childhood. Charles Warwick-Evans was a distinguished cellist and leader of the London String Quartet, who absconded while on tour in California, leaving his abandoned wife to marry a Swiss businessman named Werner Glur. There was enough money to send Joyce to St Felix’s, a fashionable girls’ boarding school at Southwold on the Suffolk coast (where she was marched around the games field by Orwell’s girlfriend, Brenda Salkeld), and, aged fifteen, to enrol her at RADA, after which catastrophe struck, her stepfather’s business collapsed and she was forced to fend for herself. Her exploits over the next half-decade, here
in an England of mass unemployment and deep unease over the coming war, are almost beyond recall. Like Barbara, a year older but indisputably cut from the same cloth, who she came across at this time, she modelled for Norman Hartnell at his premises in Bruton Street. There were very possibly fleeting appearances in a pair of Gainsborough Studios productions under the stage name of ‘Camilla Sans’, though no film directory of the period has any record of her. And then, aged twenty, there was marriage to Quennell, who according to family legend saw her from the window of the Bruton Street office where he worked and darted out of the building to introduce himself.
There followed a lightning introduction to the upper-bohemian world which was Quennell’s professional beat. They spent Christmas 1937 with Connolly and Jean in a rented house whose guests included Spender, the classical scholar and Oxford personality Maurice Bowra, Christopher Isherwood and Brian Howard. What she made of this exotic gathering – Isherwood and Howard are supposed to have amused themselves by dressing up as their mothers – is anyone’s guess. Flirtatious, sprightly, the life and soul of any party going, Glur (as Quennell had now christened her) was also a manic depressive – this had been diagnosed in the RADA years – whose flights of over-exuberance alternated with periods of chronic despair. But there was something else gnawing away at her, a second source of unhappiness that made her physiological difficulties that much harder to bear. This was the conviction that her life had taken a wrong turning, that the opportunities she coveted had been denied her, that the pleasures of the world she inhabited were as nothing compared to the path she could have pursued had fate been on her side.
At an early stage this belief seems to have concentrated on Hollywood, on the films she could have made and the starring roles she could have occupied had marriage, children, England, the war – all kinds of obstacles and impediments – not got in the way. But for Quennell, she used to say to friends – and presumably to Quennell himself – she could have taken up that offer from Paramount. There was even talk of her being debarred from an appearance in Carol Reed’s wartime biopic The Young Mr Pitt (1942), alongside Robert Donat. No hard evidence of either offer exists. ‘Tainted by self-pity’, a relative once declared, and the self-pitying seems to have begun here, out on the margins of the film world, in London flats waiting for calls that never came, in agents’ offices pushing her luck.
Meanwhile, there was Peter, marriage (it was Quennell’s third), a rented flat in Flood Street with a maid and an increasing suspicion that none of this was going to last. Not, one should hasten to add, that there was any animosity. Glur liked ‘PQ’, as she called him, notwithstanding the disbarment from Hollywood and all she could have achieved ‘but for you’, and Quennell’s letters to third parties are full of quasi-affectionate references to ‘Glurky’ and her latest escapades. What seems to have pulled them apart was the similarity of their temperaments, a refusal to settle down and plan for a future that could only be exacerbated by the privations of warfare, its continual uprootings and situational dilemmas. By the time the bomb fell on Flood Street they had both moved out. Quennell was in Northern Ireland with the Ministry of Information and already involved with Barbara, Glur staying with her mother in north London. Their daughter Sarah, born in 1942, was something of an afterthought, a souvenir from the final day of a long-ago holiday, unexpectedly resurfacing. ‘I’ve just had a sweet letter from Glurky,’ Quennell told Barbara, ‘in which she assures me that her daughter, besides being ravishingly pretty, looks just like me!’ There would be no more Christmases with the Connollys. It was time to be moving on.
But where exactly? If writers spent all their time writing, in addition to being chronically hard up, then what was the alternative? There are some characteristic glimpses of Glur in action in the memoirs of Peregrine Worsthorne, at this point an army subaltern to whom she had been introduced at his Pirbright passing-out parade. Summoned to pick her up at More House, the Chelsea home of the Wilde-era aesthete Felix Hope-Nicholson, Worsthorne arrived to find Brian Howard languidly reclining on a Récamier sofa. When they returned to More House after dinner, Glur, those present observed, was wearing her escort’s Sam Browne belt wrapped around her evening frock. Meanwhile, with a divorce in prospect – Barbara was cited as the co-respondent – she had another target in view. ‘Glurky has got her Absolute and plans to marry a middle-aged nobleman in March’, runs a scrawled PS on one of Quennell’s letters to Barbara in early 1944. This was Cedric Cardigan, or, to give him his full name, Chandos Sydney Cedric Brudenell-Bruce, heir to the marquesate of Ailesbury and about as far removed from Quennell in interests, background and demeanour as it was possible to conceive.
Thirteen years older than his prospective bride, a product of Eton and Christ Church Oxford, an enthusiastic flyer and, as such, author of Amateur Pilot (1933), the owner of an apparently unique collection of toy soldiers, Cardigan was also a war hero who, captured by the Nazis after the fall of France, had escaped from his POW camp and literally walked home to safety through France and Spain. What he imagined he was getting in Glur, immediately installed in Tottenham House, an outsize mansion hidden in the depths of Savernake Forest where she liked to be known as ‘Flavia Cardigan’, is anyone’s guess. At any rate, no sooner was the marriage solemnised than Quennell was writing to inform Barbara that it ‘may spell a good deal of trouble in the not very remote future for the affectionate but uninspiring Earl’. As for what Glur thought she was getting, her obituarist notes only that she ‘soon tired of country life’. Worsthorne, misreading his map while out on manoeuvres on Salisbury Plain, turned up one night with his patrol to find the Earl away but his wife and father, the elderly Marquess, in residence and eager for company. Some Italian prisoners of war living on the estate provided musical accompaniment and the evening became a part of regimental folklore. But Glur, too, had misread her map. Her indiscretions with the American soldiers billeted in a wing of the house caught the eye of her husband’s servants. When the divorce petition came to court, the Earl’s butler was called to give evidence.
Once again, it was time to be moving on. One constant in the Lost Girl’s life was her ability to find an escape route: a place to stay; a source of income; an eligible or not so eligible suitor. Sometimes all three came providentially combined. Three years after the war’s end, Glur, still barely thirty, was married to a wealthy young man named John Dyson Taylor, living in Belgravia and expecting a baby. The big house in Savernake Forest was left to the Earl, now hard at work on the bestselling memoir of his great escape, I Walked Alone. Three-quarters of a century later, Glur’s daughter Sarah could still remember the nursery’s red baize door.
5.
Struggling to Go Beyond Herself: Sonia 1918–45
It is as if for Sonia man could do nothing greater than to write books.
David Plante, Difficult Women (1983)
Many of the thirty or forty onlookers eating their lunch at the Café Royal on the spring day in 1940 would have known the identities of two of the three people discreetly ensconced at a table in the corner of the room. The stocky figure in the tweed jacket with the coil of proof-sheets protruding from the satchel that lay beneath his chair, fat hand raised to emphasise a conversational point, was the editor of Horizon, whose fifth number could be seen outside on the Piccadilly newsstands. The tall, curly-haired man seated next to him was his associate, Stephen Spender. On the other hand, only the restaurant’s most seasoned habitués would have recognised the plump, pale-faced girl on the other side of the table. A prodigious new literary talent whose work Horizon proposed to launch upon the world? Connolly’s mistress? A distant relative up from the country for a London jaunt? In fact, Sonia Brownell was executing what she imagined to be a commission. Although this was not her first encounter with Connolly, Spender was an old acquaintance. It was the second time in a few weeks that she had come here with him, and by his plate lay the letter she had written him a day or so later. ‘Last Thursday night at the Café Royal you asked me to edit a
number of Horizon on Young English Painters. I don’t know if you meant this, but I thought about it afterwards and these are my suggestions . . .’
Had Spender meant it? Sonia was barely twenty-one, and although she knew something about art – she had been spending her time with painters since her teens – she had almost no experience of putting pen to paper: in these circumstances, commissioning her to edit an entire number of an upmarket literary magazine in the early stages of its development would have been a gamble, and any failure marked down as a terrific misjudgement on the editors’ part. On the other hand, as both Spender and Connolly had acknowledged, the proposals set out in her letter had been assembled with considerable care. The names named – potential contributors included such ornaments of the contemporary art scene as William Coldstream, Victor Pasmore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland – were the right ones. There was a promising scheme to reprint an essay by Winston Churchill to fill in the historical background. An index; a page of small ads offering work for sale . . . Everywhere they looked came evidence of a discriminating intelligence with an eye for some of the practical realities of magazine editing.
Whether or not Spender meant it, Sonia certainly had, and ‘Horizon: Young English Painters’ might easily have come to fruition had not Peter Watson, an arch-modernist when it came to art, jibbed at devoting a whole number to a style of painting of which he thoroughly disapproved. In the end, and to her considerable annoyance, the proposal was politely declined. But Connolly, with his weather eye for talent, knew that he had chanced on something out of the ordinary. From that moment onward, here in the busy restaurant, with the clamour of Piccadilly resounding in the street outside, Sonia’s card was marked.
