by D. J. Taylor
And yet, even as the bombs fell on London, Sonia had another end in view. This was the furtherance of her relationship with Connolly and the enticing world of Horizon. The catty remarks about Spender go hand in hand with reportage from the Blitz, and in the brief intervals when some kind of social life could be resumed we can see her moving ever closer to the world of Lansdowne Terrace:
31 August 1940
Last night the big raid on London provided great entertainment. It was very exciting watching from the roof of the hospital . . .
17 September 1940
I had rather a gay weekend as I went out to dinner with Stephen on Saturday. We went to the Café Royal and met Cyril Connolly and Erika Mann and Brian Howard. I thought Brian Howard was awfully funny but not very nice, but I was rather disappointed by Erika Mann . . .
The same juxtapositions can be found in a letter sent three days later which notes that on the previous night the firemen feared they would be unable to stop the flames from a clutch of incendiary bombs reaching the hospital, before going on to remark that she hasn’t heard from Connolly for a few days and she imagines ‘that he + Diana have gone to the country’. The Blitz might be terrifying, or occasionally exhilarating, but the conditions in which she spent her days were also horribly mundane. ‘I read detective stories all day long now one after the other + eat sweets’, she told Coldstream on the last day of September.
How did she and Coldstream regard each other? The key-note of their correspondence is its dutifulness, Sonia’s concern for his wellbeing and safety and her regard for his work. But was he really the great man in whose shadow she yearned to luxuriate? A friend who suggested that she would ‘make a good wife for an artist’ got short shrift. Coldstream’s divorce was coming through, but there were no immediate plans to regularise their union. In the meantime, Sonia was itching to leave the Mobile First Aid Unit. There was a plan to try for a job in the Civil Service, but an undated later from around this time reports that ‘I had lunch with Connolly today + there is a chance that I may become secretary of Horizon. I do hope I do.’ Another letter notes that ‘I saw Cyril Connolly the other day and he suggested that I become part-time secretary to Horizon’. More concrete than these dreams of art and literature were the continuing horrors of the Blitz: ‘The All Clear has just gone. It’s really rather sinister just waiting for a noise that can go off at any minute without warning! Last night was the first night we haven’t had a raid for about a week. They generally last from 9.30 to 5 in the morning + people are getting rather tired and nervy.’
As the Blitz drew to a close, so did her dealings with Coldstream. They spent Christmas 1940 together in London and there was a brief trip to Bristol in the spring, where he was now putting his artistic skills to work on camouflage, but a major fault-line in their relationship loomed into view when his divorce grew nearer. Sonia later said that she had agreed to marry him if her name were kept out of the proceedings, and that when he cited her as a co-respondent she ended the affair. To set against this are the recollections of a friend who first met her early in 1942: even then, he thought, her life was ‘still concentrated on Coldstream’.
When the Horizon job failed to materialise, she spent a brief period working on its chief rival, John Lehmann’s Penguin New Writing – Lehmann was pleased to learn that she thought Horizon’s organisation ‘higgledy-piggledy’ – and then accepted a post at the Ministry of War Transport at Berkeley Square: the promise of a regular salary allowed her to move into a tiny flat at 18 Percy Street, halfway between Oxford Street and the Tottenham Court Road. But for all the surface orthodoxy of her Civil Service job, Sonia had proved a point about the kind of person she wanted to be. The next three years might see her occupied with war work, but she remained Connolly’s willing accomplice in any schemes he might cook up for the magazine and a highly regarded member of his inner circle. One Horizon helper remembered her ‘sitting at Cyril’s feet’. Janetta and Diana liked her; if Lys suspected her motives (and for that matter Connolly’s), then she valued her capacity for hard work, and they later became friends.
There was incontrovertible evidence of Sonia’s standing in the Horizon world, with the appearance of her essay on the Euston Road School in the May 1941 number. On the other hand, her relationship with both editor and proprietor was far from clear-cut. To Spender her unfeigned devotion to Connolly – Connolly’s interests, Connolly’s future, Connolly’s whims – was a source of mild amusement: ‘No one could enter more enthusiastically into the idea that he was the cause of genius personified and frustrated than Cyril . . . Understanding the many ways in which [he] was misunderstood provided Sonia with a tremendous brief, which took up much time and energy.’ But was he that great man for whom she pined? Several onlookers – Peter Watson was one – thought that she yearned to be Mrs Connolly, but evidence of any sexual relationship is unclear. Perhaps, when it came down to it, the gap between Connolly’s self-propagandising mystique and the reality of Connolly at work at Lansdowne Terrace was too wide for comfort. And then, as several other onlookers were keen to point out, the man whom Sonia most obviously admired on her visits to the Horizon office was its proprietor, Peter Watson. On the other hand, delight in any suggestion that Connolly was unhappy with Lys is a feature of her correspondence: ‘thoroughly bored with home life, for which I don’t blame him!’ runs one letter from 1944, while another notes that ‘Domestic happiness is more than ever conspicuous by its absence in Bedford Square.’
Years later Connolly would write an unpublished story entitled ‘Happy Deathbeds’, in which a woman named ‘Elsa’ becomes infatuated with a rich homosexual called ‘Paul’ who owns the literary magazine where she works as a secretary. There is a revealing scene in which she telephones him at his flat and afterwards reflects on the life he must live there: ‘She thought of Paul’s thin sad face, his bath running, the faint backwash from an atonal gramophone record, his money, his distinction . . .’ If this, transparently, is Watson then the psychological roots of Elsa’s obsession with him are shrewdly drawn out. Subsequently we are told that Paul is someone she can truly love ‘because, being homosexual, he inspired no sexual ambivalence, she could not hate him for desiring her or for desiring another woman. In the sex war he was a kind of angel of man’s who was on her side.’
If she could never possess Watson then, equally, he could never hurt her: each could bask in the other’s regard without the disillusionment of a physical relationship. While Connolly was, in many important respects, the kind of intellectual titan she esteemed and in whose orbit she burned to revolve, then the chaos of his emotional life was something to avoid, if only because close involvement in it was calculated to remove some of his lustre. What lurks at the bottom of these relationships, perhaps, is a faint hint of unreality, a suspicion of Sonia wanting combinations of human behaviour she knew in her heart that she could not have and settling instead for an almost mythological world in which Connolly was a figure of dazzling intellectual eminence rather than a selfish neurotic with a messy private life.
And where did this leave her? Given that Sonia spent the latter part of the war in a government office, there are comparatively few glimpses of her at this time. Such memories as survive recall an underlying hint of purpose: ‘a freshness of complexion and a Renoir-ish buxom mien,’ a friend remembered, ‘she moved with a brisk swirling of her cotton skirts.’ But Connolly made sure that he kept in touch, sent holiday postcards (‘a lovely torpid time’, he reported from Lake Windermere where he and Lys stayed in the summer of 1944), consulted her about The Unquiet Grave, which, together with Lys, she typed, and took her advice when he thought it was required: ‘I added a paragraph to the book at the spot you suggested,’ runs another postcard from the spring of 1944. ‘You were quite right.’ (Sonia thought ‘his Palinurus a very great important book. He is the most wonderful writer. I’m longing for it to come out.’)
Quietly and efficiently, though sometimes to the irritation of the people around her, So
nia had succeeded in the task she set herself. Liberated from the Ministry of War Transport in the summer of 1945, she discovered that the post she had wanted four years before was hers for the taking, and she returned to Horizon in the role of editorial secretary. Soberly dressed, with her ash-blonde hair dancing off her shoulders, alert to Connolly’s instructions but with one ear cocked for the sound of Peter Watson’s tread on the stair, she was a formidable proposition. Everyone around her knew that unwanted contributions would be promptly sent back to their authors, and the proofs returned to the printer on time.
Interlude: Angela
Even more than her half-sister Janetta, Angela Culme-Seymour tended to make an instant impression on the people she met. Gerald Brenan, renting a house to her in Málaga in the early 1930s, was so overcome by her beauty that he dropped the price to very nearly nothing. James Lees-Milne credited her with an almost Giaconda-style allure: ‘She had camellia-like skin of the softness of satin, large glowing eyes of a dreamy quality, which smiled even when her lips were solemn. Often the only movement of her face came from long bewitching lashes, which, while intoxicating the beholder, gave her an air of complete innocence.’ ‘A wonderfully beautiful girl’, Diana Mosley pronounced. Photographed by Cecil Beaton for the Tatler (‘Society portraiture at its best’, the magazine crowed) in formal dress with a double row of pearls, or, with flower-spray in hand, modelling the ‘Tricoleur’ outfit for the West End couturier Matita, she looks somehow remote and imperturbable, doing what is expected of her, but in a certain sense going through the motions, impassive, fundamentally disengaged. Significantly, Angela seems to have regarded her stunning good looks with absolute matter-of-factness. ‘I have written about my having been pretty and/or beautiful because it would have been false modesty not to do so,’ she informed readers of her extensive memoirs. ‘I do not feel embarrassed, it was so long ago, as if I were another person. But there it was, beauty that I was lucky enough to be born with and it was part of my life.’
Meanwhile, there lurked the question of what all that beauty portended. Fascinated by a countenance that seemed to give so little away, Lees-Milne noted that ‘it was difficult to tell how innocent she was or whether, like a small child, she was amoral’. Most onlookers who came across Angela in her tumultuous prime would have opted for the second diagnosis. In a milieu characterised by its casual love affairs and wrecked marriages, her romantic entanglements quickly became notorious, not merely for the impulsiveness with which they were taken up and cast aside but for the idiosyncrasies that marked their ever-erratic course. ‘Commonplace codes of behaviour simply did not apply to her,’ Lees-Milne decided. ‘Loyalty to one partner even at the start of a love affair appeared not to concern her.’ On the other hand, no one could have called Angela scheming, calculating or otherwise out to feather her nest. As was several times pointed out by shocked anatomists, her frequent love affairs rarely brought her any lasting happiness and most of the trappings of mid-century high life – money, luxury, jewellery – left her cold. She was as happy – or unhappy – among the lowlife of a Sussex pub as at the grandest country house weekend. Like ‘a ravishing cat’, Lees-Milne thought – a description which, coincidentally enough, was several times affixed to Barbara – settling on whichever cushion seemed the softest and then ambling off into the wilderness on a whim, a creature of impulse that, in exceptional circumstances, became a kind of compulsion. ‘He dominated me completely and I knew I would do whatever he asked me to,’ she remarked of the hugely unreliable charmer for whom she left her first husband. ‘Yet I did not really want to go away with him.’
But Angela’s early life was a succession of goings-away, of unpremeditated abandonments, of decisions whose authenticating mark is their complete lack of forethought. Contingency meant nothing to her and the oft-voiced determination to ‘live for the moment’ runs through her recollections like a vein of quartz through rock. If this chronic waywardness had an explanation it seemed to lie in heredity. There was precedent for the deserted first husband, left behind at a bus stop in Málaga, and it came in the shape of her exotic grandmother, Trix Ruthven, a possible model for Nancy Mitford’s ‘bolter’ in The Pursuit of Love, who, legendarily, stepped out of a train at Crewe on the way home from Scotland, leaving her children in the carriage with their nurse, and never came back. And always lurking in the background was that question of upbringing, the father dead in France and his earnest young replacement closeted in the drawing room for hours with her mother Jan. Angela’s last memories of George Culme-Seymour were of him standing in the doorway of the nursery at Tedworth Square in his Rifle Brigade uniform, and the red and blue plush doll that was his parting gift. Captain Geoffrey Woolley and his stepchildren never got on. Angela remembered her brother Mark leaning over the banisters in an attempt to spit on his head, and of opening the bathroom door and finding Geoffrey trying to manhandle his protesting stepson into six or eight inches of cold water. Did he love their mother, Angela once enquired. ‘Oh I love Jan, but I hate father,’ Mark shot back.
What Geoffrey thought of Angela is not recorded. As with Janetta, there is only passing mention of her in his memoirs. On the other hand, there were several unmissable signs of his regard: a letter, sent to her at Bedales, confessing that he was in love with her (Angela always remembered the words ‘There, now I have told you’ staring off the page in his small neat hand); a picnic where he put his hand on her thighs (his stepdaughter ‘felt only revulsion, and later pity’).
With her schooldays over and the Woolleys about to relocate to Harrow-on-the-Hill, there was a plan to send her to finishing school in Paris, but Angela had other ideas: after three uneventful months of learning to dance and skating at the Palais de Glace she asked if she could live in London and get a job. As with Barbara, she had become part of a demographic sub-group that had hardly existed before the Great War: the well-bred girl who is suddenly superfluous to family requirements, whose presence around the familial hearth means trouble and embarrassment, and whose yearning for freedom is entertained by her parents as the least demanding option available. At seventeen, ‘finished’ and with a taste for Porto flip – an eye-watering concoction made of brandy, ruby port and a single egg-yolk – which the girls were instructed to drink every day as a tonic, she came back to England and moved into a room at Queen’s Gate.
Here in South Kensington, bohemia and the beau monde came inextricably mingled. At first she got a job painting boxes, lampshades and wastepaper baskets for a shop called Touch and Go, but a supportive aunt suggested that she should ‘come out’ and join the debutante charivari of Mayfair dances and presentation at court. Before long there were five evening dresses – white chiffon, scarlet chiffon, green taffeta, shot taffeta and pale gold lamé – to join the clutter of the Queen’s Gate bedsit. In this finery, or presumably divested of it, in the course of a clandestine weekend in Brighton, she was seduced by a thirty-two-year-old House of Lords clerk named Henry Burrows. Already, though, discreet murmurings about her character, or lack of it, had begun to surface. Another relative took it upon herself to explain that no decent man would want to marry her ‘if you go on the way you have been’. Angela assumed that news of the Brighton escapade had leaked out, but all Aunt Florrie turned out to mean was that her niece should not kiss young men at dances, ‘or anyway not different ones each time. Nor at weekend house-parties.’ There was an unsuccessful meeting with the two aunts who had brought Henry up, after which they drifted apart, and she fell in with a tall young man, and possible second cousin, named Ralph Jarvis. (‘Generally I felt shy when I first met someone, especially if I liked them, but Ralph made it easy to talk, sometimes dangerously so. You told him things you had not meant to,’ Angela recalled.)
What did Angela, now in sight of her twentieth birthday, want out of life? Where did her talents lie? And who were the kind of people with whom she enjoyed spending her time? One of her closest relationships was with her brother Mark – a little too close, Gerald Brenan dedu
ced. (‘They sleep together, I haven’t the slightest doubt incestuously’, he told a friend, after meeting them for the first time. Both siblings always denied these rumours.) She liked painting, had been to life classes in Paris, enrolled at the Central School of Art and sold a couple of canvases. There was talk of a novel she might write, and the Spanish trip with Mark was supposedly undertaken with the aim of giving them time for literary work. And always there was her beauty and her highly enigmatic charm, an eternal provocation to the young men she met at debutante balls to propose marriage and the bohemians and chancers she came across beyond them to solicit her phone number and an unchaperoned date. Her mother, now in the throes of detaching herself from her second husband, could offer a spare room in the Battersea flat where she resided when in England (‘without the Rev.’) but little in the way of useful advice.
One searches for patterns in the file of Angela’s admirers and finds only happenstance. Winston Churchill’s nephew; a ‘golden-haired Russian’; a society gossip columnist; a French count; a downmarket major who offended her relatives by saying ‘pardon’, ‘lounge’ and ‘dear’: it was all the same to Angela, and one of her most attractive characteristics – in a world that, for all its free-and-easy atmosphere was keen on social hierarchies – is her lack of snobbishness. ‘Darling it does seem so funny to find you here with all these people,’ her brother Mark observed on one of these excursions into debatable lands where other Culme-Seymours would have hesitated to stray. There was an early marriage to the painter Johnny Churchill – a photograph survives of the young artist at work on her portrait – which realised a peripatetic life on the Spanish coast, a baby named Cornelia and a spur-of-the-moment walk-out with a French count, René de Chatellus of the ‘enigmatic and uncompromising stare’, a departure so unpremeditated and inexplicable that even six-and-a-half decades later Angela had difficulty in rationalising it: ‘How could I leave Cornelia? And, in spite of irritations, and even if he was sometimes pompous, and I was not madly in love with him, Johnny and I had not been unhappy together.’ Nonetheless, Cornelia was left and Johnny abandoned for a hotel in Málaga, a flat in Alicante and a morning on which Angela awoke to find her paramour gone and only nine pesetas in her purse. Clearly it was time to regroup.
