The Lost Girls

by D. J. Taylor

  To begin with, there is the fervour of their salutations – ‘Dearest Cyril’ (Sonia), ‘Darling Love’ (Lys), ‘Darling Strident Squeaking Mouse’ (Diana), ‘Darling Squiggie’ (Lys), ‘Darling Moobly’ (Diana), so many pet-names and terms of endearment that it would take a wall-chart to track their progress. Then there is the terrible self-abnegation of their gratitude. It is not simply that all those present are fixated on the man at the desk in Lansdowne Terrace or Bedford Square, but that they seem to be in a state of permanent thankfulness. They are grateful for the gifts sent to gloomy sickbeds, the ‘delicious limes and grapes which have just arrived’ (Diana). They are grateful for his morale-boosting regard. (‘Thank you again, dearest Cyril, for being so wonderful to me’, as Sonia once guilelessly put it.) They are grateful that he acknowledges their existence, still more that he recognises their abilities. (‘I am very glad you liked the review,’ Diana once assured him. ‘It has given me a feeling that perhaps I am not so half-witted as you have sometimes thought.’) Even when relationships are going badly or trouble is in the air they are missing him profoundly, longing to see him, pining for his shadow in the doorway, sending ‘love, love Sonia’, ‘love from Lysie’ or ‘love and kisses from Diana.’

  What did Darling Strident Squeaking Mouse make of this ceaseless gush of admiration and flattery? Did he calmly accept it as his due? Or did he sometimes pause to marvel at the extraordinary regard in which he was held by a group of beautiful young women who were prepared to go to almost any length to conciliate him and keep him by their side? Certainly, the Lost Girls’ devotion to Cyril’s health, wellbeing and mental equilibrium is practically fathomless in its intensity. Should he be engaged on cultural pursuits abroad they are there to encourage and console. (‘Have a lovely wonderful time and eat a whole grapefruit for breakfast and do write and say which of all the writers you like and everything.’) Should he desire some entertainment to be arranged on his behalf, a postcard will wing in to offer help. (‘I suggest we have a kind of upstairs sit-down buffet supper at 9 p.m. I will bring the food.’) Requests for information are instantly attended to. (‘Harris has just had your message . . . So I am writing at once to tell you all the news.’) Sonia’s letters sent to him from the Horizon office are extraordinary documents, straining for approval in every sentence, in which no detail of pagination or print order is too trivial to be omitted. The slightest hint of illness – a cough, the onset of a cold – has them clamouring to hear of his symptoms, counsel rest, relaxation or recommend expert help primed to effect a cure. (‘Why don’t you try Mr Neal for fibrositis?’) On one level, Lys, Diana, Sonia and the others are lovers, editorial assistants and concerned friends, but there is sometimes an irresistible temptation to see them as nursery maids with a vigilant eye trained on the pudgy figure hanging over the playpen rail.

  One mark of the esteem in which Connolly was held is his infallibility. Even in extremis, he can do no wrong, and excuses will nearly always be found for bad behaviour or the paralysing attacks of wistfulness and self-absorbed forward planning to which he was perennially subject. The remarkable thing about the letters Lys wrote to him when their relationship was breaking down is how often she apologises for something – for leaving him (‘Please forgive me for going away’), for disturbing his domestic arrangements, for having the temerity to be seen with someone else when Connolly is stalking her (‘It must have been painful when you were watching from the street to see Andrew with me in the office, but you did say you were not jealous about him’). Whatever he says goes, and the most fanciful exercises in selfishness and destiny-broking are meekly encouraged: ‘You are quite right to live intensely for the next ten years, welcoming every pleasure and new experience that comes your way. That will leave you the best years of your life for creative work.’ The Lost Girl may have been traduced, insulted, deserted or abandoned for somebody else, but Cyril’s point of view is invariably the one that counts: ‘I am not blaming you,’ Diana reassured him, after he had gone back to his wife, ‘It is quite understandable that you should prefer Jean’s assets and drawbacks to my assets and drawbacks.’

  Such are the depths of the emotional investment that the Lost Girls have made in Connolly that nearly all his ill-treatment has to be underplayed. ‘It is unreasonable to want back a person “who has bored you for eight years.” Why not find someone who doesn’t bore you?’ Lys tentatively suggested sometime in 1950. It was worse than unreasonable, but Connolly’s callousness was something Lys could rarely bring herself to admit. And yet as the instances of deceit and the high-handedness pile up, there is a sense that Connolly is being found out, that his girlfriends and his helpmeets are beginning to take the measure of some of the emotional patterns on which his life is based and not liking what they reveal. A particular annoyance was the sight of Connolly established in one relationship but unable to stop himself from making injurious comparisons with the relationships that had preceded it, often to the point of making lists which exposed his current love’s inadequacies when set against the glory of a rapidly receding past. Diana wrote him a furious letter in response to some remarks comparing her with Jean and Lys:

  You have the tact of an elephant a rhinoceros a mole. You write a long description of all the things Lys does to make you happy . . . You talk as though I did not cook a meal for you at Thatched C[ottage] – instead of breakfast lunch tea dinner for 2 months. You say she ‘enjoys it’ – Well I did NOT enjoy doing it for you after a time but I DID enjoy doing it for Peter W. Why? Because he helped & was considerate of backache. I broke my pelvis – remember?

  There follows a highly sarcastic summary of all the ways in which Diana imagines herself to have fallen short of Connolly’s ideal, tailed by a bitter acknowledgement of the reasons that will always stop her from returning to him:

  You can’t have everything so don’t harp on other people’s good qualities, harp on mine if you want me which I really & truly doubt. I cannot face it – if I lived with you I should be told how Lys cooked you breakfast how Jean was a wonderful tart in bed ALL OVER AGAIN. You are doing it all over again, making me feel unwanted. If you had really been clever & wanted me to live with you, you would have written me love letters, you would not set up another menage & then expect me to be faithful.

  To tactlessness could be added the charge of self-destructiveness, an assumption that no relationship was really worthwhile unless it hung teetering on the edge of a precipice, an unconquerable urge to subject any liaison of which he was a part to more emotional pressure than it could stand, whatever the consequences for the people caught up in it. ‘I now see that I set myself an impossible task,’ Lys once informed him. ‘You seem to have an “invisible worm” inside you which compels you not only to destroy your own happiness but also the happiness of anyone who loves you.’

  No less irksome, perhaps, were Connolly’s double standards and his hypocrisy, failings to which Lys and Diana’s letters return with a kind of homing instinct. Why, they wondered, were they expected to be faithful to him when he never reciprocated the compliment? And why did he expect this faithfulness to be maintained even when he had moved on to someone else? Lys offered a particularly anguished account of Connolly’s inadequacies in this department: ‘It is wrong of you to try & make me equally responsible for the failure of our “marriage.” I only left you after the most blatant infidelity on your part, whereas I was faithful to you for a whole 8 years with only one exception . . . & that occurred when you had thrown me into despair by your behaviour towards me’.

  Diana, too, files some withering remarks about Cyril’s keenness on having his cake and eating it. All very well, she informs him, to complain about her brief liaison with Lucian Freud, ‘BUT please remember that you have never been faithful to me & it is too absurd that you should tick me off for Lucian when at that very moment you were having Jean!’ Cyril, she tells him, can count her out. ‘I will not be faithful, I want love too.’

  And so, over the years, it goes on: a groa
ning catalogue of reproach, recrimination and regret in which fury at the way Cyril has behaved is nearly always tempered by an awareness of the dreadful consequences of letting him go and then recharged by a consciousness of moral rectitude. The girls know that they are ‘better’ than Cyril, more trustworthy, more reliable, more selfless, more kind and yet, even when the door of the flat closes behind them and the cab lies waiting in the street, they are still anxious to give him the benefit of the doubt, to find explanations for his behaviour, to acknowledge, even amid their own misery, that his interests – and his success – are what matters. Part of this stems from their belief in his genius, the thought that romantic disappointment is as nothing compared to the prospect of Cyril writing a masterpiece. ‘I do think it’s very important whom you marry,’ Lys instructed him, not long after he had left her for Barbara, ‘if only from the point of view of your writing.’ And why so? ‘If you marry someone who keeps you in a state of ferment and anxiety, you will not have the necessary calm when it comes to the time that you want to write. Your work is really more important than any woman’.

  Ultimately, Lost Girl anger at Cyril will always be replaced by a kind of self-abasing resignation, an acceptance that this is how the world works, that however hard they laboured the effort will have been insufficient. ‘I will always fall short in some ways,’ Diana told him, ‘even if I tried like I tried. When we first went to Paris, you were dissatisfied then . . . But I behaved badly I know because instead of going on trying I gave up.’ Lys’s letters strike exactly the same note (‘You must not forget that I tried really hard and that I weathered your pining for the ghosts’), constantly dwell on her ‘struggles’, her unavailing attempts to calibrate her responses to whatever happened to be going on in Connolly’s head, a battle that could never be won if only because of the constant realignments of the army drawn up on the other side.

  But there was another imbalance that separated Connolly from most of the women to whom he paid court in the 1940s. This might be defined as the contrast between their expectations. The girls want comparatively little – a home, security, a man to love and be loved by in return, with the proviso, as Diana once put it, that the man should love them ‘more than they love anyone else’. Connolly, on the other hand, wants everything: autonomy, the freedom to come and go, to vacillate between one love and another, to keep his options open whatever the nature of the ties that supposedly bind him, to procrastinate endlessly about where his true loyalties lie, to compile another of the incriminating lists in which girl a is informed quite how prodigiously she falls short when compared to girl b or even girl c who preceded them both. One sometimes feels that Connolly could only have been happy if he had managed to create a kind of composite being made up of all the women he had known in the previous ten years, all of whose disagreeable qualities had mysteriously disappeared to leave an exceptionally beautiful playmate with the wit of Madame de Staël and the culinary skills of Elizabeth David.

  If no such paragon ever declared herself, then the women who made do as substitutes would nearly always compound the bad hand that circumstance had played them by dint of their humility. Deep down they suspect that resistance is futile, that Cyril knows best, that even in the depths of their despair his are the sensibilities that matter most, that in the last resort they are not worthy of his regard. Lys’s letters are full of this terrible, self-lacerating doubt.

  I know I shall never find anybody else like you again. It is unlikely that I shall ever love anybody as much – but I am no good to you, conscious of my inadequacy, and this makes me nervous and gauche. You should have a self-confident companion.

  I have no wish for revenge, darling, nor do I put the blame for the failure of our relationship on you.

  It is because I am convinced that you will be better off without me that I am making this great effort to detach myself.

  As for that process of detachment, no one took longer to conclude a relationship than Cyril. Rather than coming to an abrupt halt, his love affairs stutter on, waver and stop only to be diffidently renewed and then, in their death throes, agonised over for months on end. You suspect that, as well as being cast down by this constant re-evaluation of motive and desire, Cyril also took pleasure in it, that his reluctance to let go of a significant other was a species of game-playing, full of anxiety and disquiet but also capable of affording him an odd kind of emotional satisfaction. His separation from Lys, for example, went through at least half-a-dozen individual phases, and even in the months before his marriage to Barbara he seems convinced that he can have her back if only he truly wants it. But Lys, by this time, was beyond persuading. Or rather, not quite. Of the countless letters she addressed to Connolly through the latter part of 1949 and the early part of 1950, perhaps the saddest was written from Orthez sometime in the spring: ‘You are the only person I love – I cannot “beg you to take me back” because I only left you when my spirit was completely broken by your passionate affairs with “destroyers.”’ Lys goes on to assure him that ‘If you will only stop blaming me and see things as they are we can make a fresh start.’ But the effort will have to come from Connolly: ‘As my feelings for you have never wavered – and yours for me have – then surely we can only come together again if you are able to convince me that, after all, I mean more to you than Barbara etc. If I don’t then it would be much better for us to live as if the other were dead.’ He will not find it easy to replace her, she warns. ‘But I would rather live alone than relive the last two years.’ There follows the usual note of self-deprecation: ‘I know this kind of letter is a bore, but I feel I must explain all this – and now I need never refer to it again.’

  Ironically, at the time this was written Connolly was reconnoitring his way around the one woman who at this stage in his career seems to have been able to deal with him. Holed up in the Kentish countryside with a companion who remained resolutely unimpressed by his posturings and his wistful romantic dreams, the plump, middle-aged despoiler of so many female hearts had finally met his match.

  13.

  Projections: The Lost Girls in Fiction

  ‘How are you enjoying political life?’

  ‘Like any other form of life – sheer hell.’

  Conversation between Nick Jenkins and Pamela Widmerpool in Anthony Powell, Books Do Furnish a Room (1971)

  The twelve volumes of Anthony Powell’s novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time, a vast conspectus of English life between the end of the Great War and the late 1960s, appeared between 1951 and 1975. Barbara seems to have come late to the books: at any rate there are no references to them in her letters to Powell until the early 1980s. On the other hand, when she did begin to read them she was in no doubt as to where Powell might have got his inspiration for the sullen, man-eating and terminally disaffected Pamela Widmerpool (née Flitton). ‘I shall follow Pamela’s fate. Does she come to a sticky end?’ enquires one letter. ‘I have just read The Military Philosophers,’ runs another. ‘I thought you were very subtly funny with Pamela, she gets worse, I’m told, but I do not have the sequel here. Naturally, I shall sue.’

  Powell’s response to this challenge was characteristically oblique. Reading the first volume of Barbara’s memoirs, on their appearance in 1987, he noted that she ‘makes no bones about causing trouble for its own sake, indeed resemblance to Pamela Flitton could hardly be more emphasized’. Rung up by an inquisitive journalist and asked to confirm or deny the identification he ‘replied with guarded affirmative’. Years later, learning there were plans for a TV programme on the subject of ‘real people’ in fiction in which Barbara might appear, he conceded that it ‘certainly might be funny’.

  Many of the people attached to Connolly’s circle in the 1940s were writers. It was inevitable that as they moved into middle age and sought to re-cast some of their experiences in fiction that the world of Horizon, its contending personalities and its emotional intrigue, should play a part in half-a-dozen novels that touch on the subject of literary li
fe in wartime London and that, individually and collectively, the Lost Girls should take on a variety of incidental roles.

  If Waugh, Powell and Nancy Mitford were all sharp-eyed observers of Connolly’s foibles, then by far the cruellest portrait of him in action was written by a Horizon insider. Michael Nelson (1921–90) had worked on the magazine in the early days: A Room in Chelsea Square, first published anonymously in 1958, is a curious example of a novel that shoulders its way out of one cultural background into another while leaving many a trace of its original framing for the reader to puzzle over. Originally written in the late 1940s, at which point its gay themes were carefully concealed beneath a top-coat of heterosexuality, and then called A Room in Russell Square, A Room in Chelsea Square was culturally updated for the late 1950s to include faintly incongruous references to such Eden-era fads as Existentialism and Teddy boys. At the same time, no one with a working knowledge of conditions at Lansdowne Terrace could fail to spot that ‘Ronnie Gras’, its magazine editor, is Connolly, that ‘Patrick’, his rich, homosexual backer, is a bitchy caricature of Peter Watson and that several other Horizon mainstays are cruelly reimagined in some of the supporting parts.

  Nelson himself appears as ‘Nicholas’, an ambitious youngster working for a provincial newspaper but anxious to make a career for himself on the London arts scene. Ronnie, alternatively, is represented as a former painter whom Patrick thinks of setting up as editor of a fashion magazine in the style of Harper’s or Vogue. One of the attractions of the project to beady-eyed Patrick is that Nicholas can be employed on it. (‘He would bring him to London and launch him on a career.’) As a preliminary move in what is clearly intended as a campaign of seduction he gets a friend who edits a popular newspaper called the Gladiator to offer him a job. If any doubt remained as to Ronnie’s original, it is immediately dispelled by mention of his fat and protruding stomach, his (highly successful) womanising, his status as a gourmand and wine buff, his Connolly-esque habit of spending long, meditative hours in the bath and his tendency to say things such as ‘My Angst has been absolutely dreadful this last week.’ Among many injurious comparisons, it is said of him that ‘he can sniff out a bottle of champagne like one of those clever animals that can smell water hundreds of miles away’. Seeing him at dinner, Patrick is pleased to notice ‘that the extraordinary creature at the head of the table with the physiognomy of an ape and a mind of the most intricate and delicate pattern, was in a large measure one of his own creations’.