The Lost Girls

by D. J. Taylor

  From one angle the three-way correspondence between Connolly, Watson and Sonia from which Horizon’s post-war history can be pieced together has a single theme: the devolution of responsibility. A responsibility, more to the point, that the editorial secretary in her Bloomsbury eyrie was very anxious to see devolved. As she puts it in a letter she wrote to Connolly and Lys in the summer of 1946 when they were away on their self-styled honeymoon: ‘I was rather sad to hear that you’re coming back so soon – not because I’m not longing to see you both – I am, but because I hope it doesn’t mean that everything isn’t delicious or that you’ve run out of money or something horrid. Please don’t worry about Horizon because everything is magnificent.’ There were occasionally complaints of high-handedness – Francis Wyndham remembered how ‘established poets would send in stuff . . . and get sent a rather patronising letter from this blonde girl they’d never heard of’ – but the notes and postcards that Connolly sent home from his travels are abundant evidence of just how much he was beginning to rely on her judgement: ‘I sent comment to Curzon [Horizon’s printers],’ runs a letter from 1946, ‘please correct it against manuscript in case they misread it, please also alter the tone if it seems to you too flippant OR too serious anywhere.’ By 1948, reliance was turning into outright delegation. ‘How is the September number?’ Connolly enquired from the Villa Mauresque, where he and Lys were staying with Somerset Maugham. ‘Do accept anything you think good . . . Will you write and ask Mary MacCarthy to review the Kinsey Report for us?’ The same letter notes, a shade wistfully, that ‘It seems a long time since I had some Horizon news – do write to me & send any interesting letters that don’t need an answer. I liked the last number very much.’

  And if Horizon’s editor was increasingly detached from the publication on whose masthead his name appeared, then so, to a certain extent, was its proprietor. Peter Watson, too, was not the man he had been two or three years before. Part of this was due to the long and debilitating illness that had kept him abroad in the early part of 1946. A little more could be ascribed to an increasingly complex love-life. But like Connolly, Watson’s professional eye had begun to turn elsewhere. Suspicious of his editor’s long-term intentions, conscious that his love of the arts might benefit from a wider focus than a monthly magazine with a limited circulation, he seems increasingly to have regarded Connolly as someone to be put up with and reminded of his duties rather than a bright star permanently agleam in literary London’s firmament. Still, he was Horizon’s guarantor, it was his money that subsidised its weekly appearance on the newsstands and paid for Connolly’s foreign jaunts, and he liked and warmly approved of Sonia. If the relationship between proprietor and editor was showing its age, then the bond between proprietor and editorial secretary grew ever closer.

  Much of this involved engaging Sonia for surveillance duties, monitoring Connolly’s comings and goings, using her to keep him up to the mark, chide him for bad time-keeping or question such hints of the editorial forward planning as had come Watson’s way. ‘No news from Cyril,’ complains a letter sent from New York early in 1947. ‘Is he turning up every morning at 9.30? (nothing left in the In Tray at 5.30.) I wonder.’ From Jamaica, two years later, he expresses a hope that ‘the Auden stuff by Spender isn’t included in the next. Auden told me in N.Y. that it was simply factually untrue & would be most upset if Cyril published it too.’ For most of the time, en route from one continental resort to another, Watson is simply in pursuit of information of a kind that only Sonia could supply. ‘Please send me the latest HORIZON to Hotel Inghilterra Rome’ instructs a letter sent from Sicily in the summer of 1947, ‘also proofs of Malta photos & anything else you may have to direct me – and I hope a newsy letter.’

  At the same time there was more to their relationship than a shared fixation on Connolly, Connolly’s whereabouts and Connolly’s (presumed) lack of commitment. In Peter Watson, Sonia had found a man who, though romantically unavailable, was genuinely solicitous of her interests, worried about her wellbeing and her finances, anxious that she should be rescued from the lure of overwork, take proper holidays and enjoy herself. Three letters sent back from Europe in the summer of 1947 are full of offers of extra money and time off, and concern for her health.

  This little cheque is for you and I hope will have its uses. I don’t think you get enough of what you deserve and it is a constant source of regret to me your holiday was so short and so unlike a holiday & I didn’t think you looked at all well just before I left London. Where is this happiness you should certainly have and do not seem to get – I mean the real kind and not that pasha’s idea of it?

  I have written a letter to Cyril which I fear will make him cross with me. I didn’t mention anything about you except to suggest that you had his £5 a week expense nonsense added to your screw while he is permanently absent as you do all the work.

  I really think you should just disappear to where you want for 3 or 4 weeks. Please do. It can make no difference when a number has just gone to press.

  Quite as blatant as Watson’s concern for Sonia is his subtext. Connolly, clearly, is the ‘pasha’ whose idea of happiness is bogus, and helps himself to expenses payments to which he is not entitled while harassed assistants drudge on in his absence. Sonia, we infer, deserved something better and, throughout the later 1940s, Watson was constantly at work to provide it. He arranged cinema visits and evenings out. To an England mired in the depths of austerity, he returned with silk stockings from America. (‘Is your stocking size 9½? I forget. Let me know & I’ll get some more.’) Above all, he introduced her to the members of his social circle, predominantly, though not exclusively, homosexuals whose company Sonia very much enjoyed. She made a particular friend of Watson’s American boyfriend Waldemar Hansen, one of whose poems she took for Horizon and whose letters are full of approving references to her charm. After Hansen’s return to America, and a year after a Halloween party he had hosted, she sent a postcard sorrowing over their lost friendship: ‘Peter and Lys and I are sitting here in tears in the gloaming . . . We miss you and wish we could have another party.’

  Several of Sonia’s shrewdest observers from this period are from Watson’s entourage, and their appraisals of her have a delicacy that heterosexual friends occasionally struggle to achieve. Above all, they were sympathetic to the emotional predicaments of a forthright and outwardly self-confident woman who struggled to achieve satisfactory relationships and whose assertive manner could sometimes set prospective boyfriends back on their heels. ‘So sweet,’ Hansen wrote at about this time to his friend John Myers, ‘and I wish we could find a lovely man for her.’

  But where was this paragon to be sought? Sonia’s romantic life in the mid-1940s is more or less beyond recovery. She is known to have had brief affairs with Koestler and Lucian Freud, both of whom have been plausibly canvassed as the father of the unborn child that took her to an abortion clinic sometime in 1947, and she was fruitlessly pursued by suitors as various as Maclaren-Ross and G. W. Stonier, the books editor of the New Statesman. Naturally, these rejections did nothing for her popularity. As Hilary Spurling notes, much of the disparagement that followed her around literary London – the complaints about her bossiness, her overbearing manner, her perceived sexual coldness – was down to outraged amour propre and wounded male vanity. But in the summer of 1946 came the first glimmerings of what began as a friendly attachment but was to turn into one of the most important relationships of her life. The catalyst, appropriately enough, was Peter Watson, the setting was Paris, where Watson had taken her on holiday, and the context could be found in the admiring looks directed by Horizon at the literary culture of post-liberation France.

  To the Francophile Connolly, French literary life had everything that its post-war English equivalent lacked: confidence; passion; style and swagger; the whole effortlessly overseen by a succession of titanic reputation-brokers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Raymond Queneau. Horizon’s May 1945 number had featured part of Sartr
e’s manifesto for his new literary magazine, Les Temps modernes. Here on the Left Bank, a year later, Sonia found herself being introduced to a member of the magazine’s staff, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In his late thirties, and shortly to take up a professorial appointment at the École normale supérieure, the author of La phénoménologie de la perception (1945) was instantly smitten by his English counterpart, claiming to have detected in her ‘a mixture of gaiety and sorrow which is something unusual and, as I think, fine’. By his account they discussed Orwell, Koestler and the young philosopher A. J. Ayer with an eye to a Horizon essay. A few days later, even before Sonia had returned home, came a letter, addressed to ‘Dear Sonia Brownell’, complimenting her command of the French language (‘I wish I would be able to write this letter in English from the beginning to the end, – as a proof of my gratitude for your perfect French’), recalling ‘talks with you about Orwell, Ayer etc’ and proposing ‘a paper about their so-called humanism’. Merleau-Ponty signed off with an elegant personal flourish. He would be delighted to meet her again, he declared, ‘at the beginning of the week and afterwards in your own country, with your own friends and performing your own behaviour’.

  There would always be difficulties about Merleau-Ponty, who in addition to living on the further side of the English Channel had a wife and a child and little interest in giving either of them up. To Sonia, more accustomed to the clumsy importunings of the Horizon contributors or being stalked around the streets of Bloomsbury by Maclaren-Ross, he was a beau idéal. ‘I never longed for anything in my life so much as M.’, she once wrote on the blank page of a notebook. The proposal for a paper on Orwell’s so-called humanism was turned down, but by the summer of 1947 she was back in Paris, delighting Maurice with her English irony and the gimlet eye she trained on the antics of his more politically minded friends. A letter headed ‘Sunday’ and typed on Horizon paper conveys both the depth of her infatuation and her lack of sympathy with her boyfriend’s colleagues on the French Left. ‘I terribly want to write to you this evening, although I wish you were here so that I could talk to you instead’, she begins, before going on to register her anxiety over the political situation and describe a lunch with two French socialists, Roland Barthes and Dionys Mascolo: ‘they talked about the civil war as one talks about a visit to the dentist. When they came to discussing how to make efficient bombs out of bottles with petrol I could have knocked their heads together with impotent rage, and I only refrained from screaming when they said that any form of personal pleasure was a waste of time because they were so busy getting tight and so pleased with the clothes they had bought on the black market that it became rather touching.’

  Sympathetic friends signalled their approval. ‘If you’re madly in love & don’t want to come back, say so’, Connolly advised. As for the prospects of some kind of shared existence, with or without the impediment of Madame Merleau-Ponty, there was talk of Sonia acquiring a job in Paris, or of Maurice getting Ayer to fix him up with an academic post in London. When neither of these schemes came to fruition, Merleau-Ponty decided to spend the last few days of 1947 in England (‘Arriverai Victoria Vendredi 18 heures 30 Yours Maurice,’ runs a telegram dated 23 December). They saw in the New Year at the flat in Percy Street, where Sonia – always keen on presenting her young men with items of clothing – gave him a waistcoat for Christmas.

  Meanwhile, another of Sonia’s admirers was continuing to press his suit. After establishing himself on his Hebridean island, together with son, housekeeper and sister Avril, Orwell had spent the winter of 1946/7 in London. Returning to Jura in the spring, he waited only a day to inform ‘Dearest Sonia’ of his arrival, offer details of his house and its surroundings (‘There are daffodils all over the place, the only flower out. I’m still wrestling with more or less virgin meadow, but I think by next year I’ll have quite a nice garden here’), and suggest that Sonia, perhaps accompanied by Janetta and Nicolette – a possible playmate for Richard – should come and stay with him. ‘I wrote to Genetta [sic] asking her to come whenever she liked & giving instructions about the journey. So long as she’s bringing the child, not just sending it, it should be simple enough.’ His aim, he assured her, was to impart ‘the complete details about the journey, which isn’t so formidable as it looks on paper’. But Jura, whatever Orwell might think about its comparative ease of access, was a remote spot. There followed seventeen lines of meticulous instruction, including a paragraph on the necessity of writing well in advance and problems that might arise along the way: ‘If you come by boat, you could probably get a car all right by asking at the quay, but if you come by air there wouldn’t be a car at the ferry (which is several miles from Craighouse) unless ordered beforehand.’ A further paragraph advertised the need for a raincoat, stout shoes or boots, and how it would help if she brought that week’s rations. ‘I am afraid I am making all this sound very intimidating,’ Orwell gamely concluded, ‘but really it’s easy enough & the house is quite comfortable. The room you would have is rather small, but it looks out onto the sea. I do so want to have you here.’

  Sonia’s reply to this forensic account of the Road to Jura has not survived, but she did not take up the offer. The next eighteen months, in any case, were to be devoted to what she frankly acknowledged was the love of her life. All this begs the question of what Merleau-Ponty, plainly bedazzled by the bright English girl he had met among the Existentialists of the Left Bank, made of her when they were reunited on her own territory. Sonia was ‘an uneasy partner’ where men were concerned, a friend once pronounced. If Merleau-Ponty was captivated by the force of her personality, then he was less keen on her wary, obstructive side: their last night together at Percy Street in the January of 1948 ended in a raging quarrel. And hanging over this cross-Channel affair was the spectre of Madame Merleau-Ponty. At an early stage in the proceedings, Maurice seems to have made it clear to Sonia that he was not prepared to divorce his wife. Neither was Madame prepared to turn a blind eye to his infidelity. No doubt she had got wind of the nights her husband had spent in Sonia’s hotel in the rue Jacob when she stayed in Paris in the spring of 1948, for when Sonia came back there later in the year it was to find a note from Madame Merleau-Ponty returning a letter to Maurice and explaining that he had left town.

  If there was no decisive break between Sonia and Maurice – they continued to meet, correspond and scheme in the hope of reconciliation – then it was also clear that the relationship had no long-term future: geography, temperament and Madame Merleau-Ponty had seen to that. It was in this febrile atmosphere, returned to England and plunged into her Horizon work – Peter Watson was away for the first four months of 1949, which increased her responsibilities – that her life took a wholly unexpected turn, and Orwell, peripheral to her existence for the past three years, gradually became central to it. In the year-and-a-half since he had attempted to inveigle her to Jura, Orwell’s professional star had waxed as his health had waned. Nineteen Eighty-Four, completed shortly before Christmas 1948, was with his publishers, acclaimed as a masterpiece and awaiting publication in the summer. But the effort of finishing the book – typed sitting up in bed while chain-smoking in a room warmed by a noxious-smelling paraffin heater – had been too much for Orwell’s damaged lungs. By the spring of 1949 he was installed in a sanatorium in Cranham, Gloucestershire, his mind bent upon his physical condition, his book but also, as a letter to his publisher Fred Warburg makes clear, the faint stirrings of romance.

  ‘As she may have told you, I had to put Sonia Brownell off,’ he told Warburg. ‘I am in the most ghastly health & have been for some weeks.’ He had been so feverish for the last few days, he explained, that he had been unable to walk to the X-ray and stand against the screen. But this was merely to postpone the inevitable. ‘When the picture is taken, I am afraid there is not much doubt it will show that both lungs have deteriorated.’ This prognosis was correct: when he asked one of the doctors if she thought he would survive, she would say only that
she didn’t know. Yet in the midst of this uncertainty, Orwell remained curiously optimistic. ‘The one chance of surviving, I imagine, is to keep quiet. Don’t think I am making up my mind to peg out,’ he assured Warburg. ‘On the contrary, I have the strongest reasons for wanting to stay alive.’ One of them, clearly enough, was Sonia. She was at Cranham to celebrate his forty-sixth birthday on 25 June. Another letter to his friend David Astor from mid-July reports that he is in better health and that ‘when I am well & about again, sometime next year perhaps, I intend getting married again. I suppose everyone will be horrified, but it seems to me a good idea. Apart from other considerations, I think I should stay alive longer if I were married & had someone to look after me.’ As for the name of his intended, ‘It is to Sonia Brownell, the sub-editor of “Horizon,” I can’t remember if you know her but you probably do.’

  What had happened to bring this match about? One crucial preliminary was a visit that Sonia had made to Paris earlier in the month with Peter Watson: it was here that she seems to have decided that all was over between her and Merleau-Ponty. Orwell probably asked her to marry him in mid-July 1949: his first words after registering her acceptance were apparently, ‘You must learn to make dumplings.’ Thereafter, the progress of their relationship can be tracked through Orwell’s letters. Early in August, he asked for copies of Burmese Days and Coming Up for Air to be sent to Sonia at Horizon. In the first week of September, by now transferred from Cranham to University College Hospital in Bloomsbury, he wrote a long letter to Astor expressing a hope that he would soon be able to meet his bride-to-be. ‘Sonia lives only a few minutes away from here. She thinks we might as well get married while I am still an invalid, because it would give her a better status to look after me, especially if, eg., I went somewhere abroad after leaving here.’ As to the general reaction, Orwell declared himself ‘much encouraged by none of my friends and relatives seeming to disapprove of my remarrying, in spite of this disease. I had an uneasy feeling that “they” would converge from all directions & stop me, but it hasn’t happened. Moreland, the doctor, is very much in favour of it.’