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  There were several reasons why Connolly – in excellent spirits, friends remembered, now that his immediate future had been settled – was looking forward to his early autumn trip to the north Devon coast opposite Lundy Island. One was that Diana had agreed to accompany him. Another, possibly even the reason for his choice of destination, was that Janetta and Hugh were staying in the area. A third was the chance it offered to brood on the possibilities offered by Watson’s as yet unquantified largesse. Certainly, the new venture – as yet unnamed – obsessed him. Janetta, whom he visited, remembered ‘talking for hours’ about the magazine. Who would write for it? Who would work for it? What line, if any, would it take on the war? Who would design its cover? Who would print it? The autumn afternoons grew shorter; the winds blew in from the Bristol Channel; two hundred miles away in London Watson and his associate editor shook hands on the use of Spender’s flat as an office; but in the room on the Devon coast the teenage girl and the jowly thirty-six-year-old chattered on: the midwives at Horizon’s beginning.

  3.

  When the Going was Good: Lys, Connolly and Horizon 1939–45

  Cyril, Hog Watson and many another lefty are avoiding military service by dint of being editors of a magazine . . . which is a reserved occupation. Isn’t it brilliant?

  Nancy Mitford, letter to Violet Hammersley, 26 December 1940, Love from Nancy (1993)

  Nothing seems to toughen me. People will always fall in love with me because I am sweet and unselfish, only to use me for their own ends and trample upon me.

  Lys, letter to Cyril Connolly, early 1950

  One evening in the early summer of 1939, three months before Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war on Nazi Germany, a young man called Gavin Ewart was making his way along the western edge of Piccadilly. An aspiring poet, two years down from Cambridge, Ewart was filling in time with secretarial work while he plotted his assault on the citadels of literary London. He was also involved in a relationship with an immensely beautiful girl, two years younger than himself, named Lys Dunlap. Usually Ewart’s route home by way of the bus stop at Hyde Park Corner passed without incident. Now, as he traversed the railings of Green Park, something unusual happened. A sharp-faced boy in his late teens stepped out of the shadows and began to follow him along the pavement, yelling abuse as he went. ‘Gavin Ewart is a terrible person,’ he kept repeating, ‘Gavin Ewart is a terrible person.’

  What made the encounter even stranger, Ewart decided, was that he knew who the boy was – a fledgling painter called Lucian Freud whom he had met not long before at the Lansdowne Terrace flat of their mutual friend, Stephen Spender. Why should Freud want to hurl insults at him? What had he done to offend him? But all the way along the western side of Piccadilly the chant continued, like a mantra – ‘Gavin Ewart is a terrible person. Gavin Ewart is a terrible person.’ The experience was so disquieting that it stuck in Ewart’s head for half-a-century, haunted his creative imagination and eventually re-emerged as poetry. In ‘Freud’, which recasts this tense five minutes or so in some chopped up lines of irregular blank verse, Ewart recalls his bewilderment, his inability to deflect the attack or ask the younger man what he was doing.

  . . . I cowered. I wasn’t used to such attacks,

  I’d done nothing whatsoever to deserve such attacks,

  I was innocent and unsophisticated. What could

  I answer?

  I now realize I should have stopped walking, and

  made an answer

  Was he drunk, or on drugs – or was it a fugue?

  Is that sort of thing what the shrinks call a fugue?

  Without stating the fact in so many words, the next few stanzas offer an explanation for why Lucian Freud should have stalked Ewart home down Piccadilly that evening in summer 1939. Shortly afterwards, Ewart’s relationship with Lys came to an end. Not long afterwards, she married a man named Ian Lubbock, met when the two of them were briefly working at the Dorchester Hotel. Ewart never saw Freud again.

  But I heard about him, later that year, from

  Ian Lubbock

  when he had married Lys. My girlfriend. Next,

  Mrs Lubbock.

  In 1939, I would guess. He came home one day, he

  told me,

  and found Lys in bed with Freud – that’s what he told

  me.

  He didn’t seem worried; it was like a piece of gossip.

  Ewart’s final judgement hangs slightly out of reach, but it is tempting to attribute Freud’s outburst in Piccadilly to simple jealousy: he wanted Lys to himself. The young painter’s pursuit of this gorgeous, and only intermittently attainable girl continued for several years. There were attempts to paint Lys’s portrait, while a letter from the end of 1940 records his coming to sit next to her while she had dinner at the Ritz Bar – definite proof, Lys thought, that ‘he still seems to be on my trail’.

  The Dunlaps were from the west coast of America, not exactly pioneer stock but soldiers and adventurers operating on the margin of a country that was taking shape around them and keenly aware of the opportunities it offered to men with ambition and tenacity. Lys’s grandfather, General Edward Dunlap (1848–1926), had fought in the Indian Wars and served as Military Governor of the Philippines. Her father Edward (b. 1872), made a fortune in the Alaskan goldrush, married a Welsh schoolteacher named Ida Davies, and relocated to Wyoming, where he became a successful mine owner. Lys, the younger of his two daughters, was born in nearby Butte, Montana, in 1917. By the time that Mr Dunlap died in an automobile smash in Philadelphia in 1932, his wife and children – there was also a son named Michael – had long since returned to Britain. If there was any family money left, it seems not to have crossed the Atlantic. Orphaned in her mid-teens after her mother’s early death, Lys, like many another Lost Girl, was forced to fend for herself.

  Following a well-worn route into the inter-war era labour force, she trained at Pitman’s secretarial college and the London Polytechnic, and took office jobs. Capable, industrious and supremely good-looking, she supplemented her income with part-time modelling. Lee Miller’s Vogue photograph from 1941 is a stunning portrait in which, cat-like, aloof and with swept-back waved hair, she wears what might almost be a pastiche parlour-maid’s outfit, black-sided with white front and bow. By her early twenties, with Ewart cast to one side, she was married to Ian Lubbock, a schoolteacher with theatrical aspirations, and living in a flat in Great Ormond Street. She was also, by virtue of a stint at the advertising agency in Bruton Street, a friend of Peter Quennell. In all kinds of ways, Lys’s path through the London of early 1940 was bringing her ever closer to the man with whom she was to spend the next ten years of her life: the fascinating, alluring and increasingly powerful figure of Cyril Connolly.

  By the early autumn of 1939, Horizon was no longer a bright idea dreamed up on an idle summer’s afternoon but a magazine in embryo. On 7 October, the New Statesman printed ‘The Ivory Shelter’, a surprisingly combative essay from a determined non-combatant, in which Connolly ruminated on the war’s likely effect on contemporary writing (‘the best modern war literature is pacifist and escapist and either ignores the war or condemns it’) and, by implication, the aesthetic stance that any publication edited by him in wartime might be expected to adopt in relation to it. A fortnight later Connolly ramped up his attack by composing a circular letter to the New Statesman’s subscribers – a natural home for the brand of leftish-leaning scepticism he proposed to lay before the public – asking for support and suggestions. The firm of H. F. and G. Witherby, run by Diana’s father, was engaged as printers; Peter Watson signed a formal contract to underwrite 1000 copies of the first four issues at £33 per number, while agreeing an informal arrangement with the newly appointed editor to pay the magazine’s staff and the office expenses.

  The bustle and excitement of Horizon’s foundation, much of it focusing on the lustre of his own personality, suited Connolly. ‘An editor frays away his true personality in the banalities of good mix
ing’, he later complained, ‘he washes his mind in other people’s bathwater, he sacrifices his inner voice to his engagement book’, which rather ignores the satisfaction he took in the day-to-day routines of magazine editing, let alone the constant atmosphere of low-level intrigue. And yet, however enthusiastically he flung himself into arrangements for the launch, interviewed potential assistants and petitioned the great and good for contributions, he was grimly aware that the magazine’s position – and by implication his own – was still highly precarious. All Peter Watson had legally committed himself to was a payment of £112 to a Holborn printer. If he disliked what he read, or thought that Connolly was exploiting his good nature or lacked the stamina that such an enterprise required, he might easily withdraw his support. There was also a suspicion that, here in a wartime world of falling investment values, the Watson fortune would soon be worth a great deal less. A generous and enlightened sponsor of the arts, Watson was also a prudent man who would have no qualms in pulling out of an agreement if he decided that his financial situation demanded it. Connolly’s early letters in search of contributions were correspondingly downbeat. ‘I am editing a paper, monthly of a flimsy kind, called Horizon, with Stephen Spender and Peter (W.),’ he informed his old friend Alan Pryce-Jones on 19 October. ‘I wish you would let us have something for it . . . We pay, though rather gingerly.’

  To amplify Connolly’s feeling of unease was the fact that his personal life was, once again, in disarray. Two days after the appearance of his New Statesman piece, he and Diana had been involved in a traffic accident in Sloane Square when an army lorry had crashed into the side of their taxi. Connolly was unhurt, but Diana emerged from the collision with a broken pelvis and spent the next two-and-a-half months in hospital. All this was sufficiently dramatic to inspire Jean to return to her husband’s side. ‘The blackout is really formidable,’ Evelyn Waugh noted in his diary, ‘– all the gossip is of traffic casualties – the night watchman of the St James’s knocked down the club steps, Cyril Connolly’s mistress lamed for life and Cyril obliged to return to his wife.’ But there was an unhappy circularity to the Connollys’ new domestic arrangements, for they eventually came to roost at 26a Yeoman’s Row, Knightsbridge – the same flat in which Connolly and Patrick Balfour had begun their London lives back in 1927. Looking around the familiar décor of ‘this Haunted House’, making his way home through streets that had long ago echoed to his tread, Connolly could have been forgiven for wondering exactly what he had achieved in the intervening years.

  All this meant that Horizon’s debut in the first week of December 1939, its Ministry of Information imprimatur supplied by Connolly and Spender’s handily placed friend Harold Nicolson, came hedged about with uncertainty. There had been proud talk of encouraging unknown writers, of bankrolling hitherto unheralded promise, of blithely disregarding both the feuds of the past and the inertia of the present, of an effort to ‘synthesise the aestheticism of the Twenties and the puritanism of the Thirties’ – both subjects on which Connolly was an acknowledged expert – into something better. But when it came to it none of the famous names whose help Connolly had so avidly solicited – E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot – had managed to produce anything; in their place came such favourites of the middlebrow reading public as W. Somerset Maugham, Hugh Walpole and J. B. Priestley – exactly the kind of writers that the younger Connolly had made a point of disparaging in his apprentice years. ‘Small, trivial, dull. So I think from not reading it,’ Virginia Woolf sniffed to her diary.

  However unpromising the omens, the magazine was a success: 3500 copies were disposed of the first number and twice as many of the second (for purposes of comparison with 1930s literary magazines, the circulation of the determinedly populist London Mercury rarely exceeded 10,000 while the subscription list to Eliot’s New Criterion never got into four figures). By the time the fourth number appeared in March 1940, Watson was signifying his approval: ‘I find the magazine excellent . . .’ he informed his editor. ‘Please tell me who is George Orwell: his article is splendid.’

  The piece that had caught Watson’s eye was ‘Boys’ Weeklies’; there were to be many more like it over the next eight years. As for Connolly’s achievement, any kind of judgement on Horizon’s merits is liable to be clouded by the difficulty of calibrating what was said about it at the time with some of the compliments (and also some of the brickbats) it attracted long after the editorial office had closed its doors. On the one hand, it takes only a glance at the index to the ten bound volumes or The Golden Horizon (1953), Connolly’s posthumous anthology, to establish the range and precision of Connolly’s tastes. Certainly, a literary magazine that managed to bring together such diverse talents as Orwell, Henry Miller, Sacheverell Sitwell and Octavio Paz would be an ornament to any literary era, let alone that of Connolly and Spender. Almost any number taken at random off the shelf has something to be said for it – the issue of June 1948, say, which features a poem by Louis MacNeice, a fragment of Augustus John’s autobiography, Lawrence Durrell on the physician Georg Groddeck and the paintings of André Bauchant. ‘It is very proper that you should have proud memories of Horizon,’ Evelyn Waugh assured Connolly from the vantage point of 1961. ‘It was the outstanding publication of its decade.’

  From another angle, Waugh’s encomium was less a tribute to Horizon’s influence than an acknowledgement of some of its failings. To Connolly’s detractors – and there were always plenty of these – the magazine was not only a projection of his personality but a home for members of his clique, the friends – not all of them conspicuously talented – he had made at Eton and Oxford, or picked up during his 1930s wanderings: the same old people, his critics insisted, and for the most part saying the same old things. As for the commitment to finding new voices, seeking contributions from parts of the demographic where the era’s highbrow magazines rarely strayed, then John Lehmann’s New Writing can sometimes seem much keener on taking risks, much more sympathetic to working-class voices of the calibre of Sid Chaplin and B. L. Coombes, and there is a rather awful symbolism in the fact that when Connolly got round to publishing a piece about working in a coal mine, the author should turn out to be not a genuine proletarian but an Old Etonian whose parents owned the mine.

  There is no getting away from these imputations of gentlemanly suavity, and of a series of aesthetic assumptions that were as much social as literary. But this, it might be argued, was the price that had to be paid for allowing Connolly – a man whose literary sensibilities were inextricably bound up with every other part of his life – to become the enterprise’s chief pundit and taste broker. And complaints about Connolly’s editorial persona, the favours done and the responsibilities evaded, have a habit of ignoring Horizon’s prodigious influence on an artistic world that not only flourished in the 1940s but whose reach extended into the decade beyond. If what became known as the ‘Herbivore’ culture of the 1950s, the world of the BBC Third Programme, the New Statesman critic and the Penguin paperback, had a guiding spirit it could be found here in the office at Lansdowne Terrace in the shape of a jowly, cigar-smoking fat man browsing idly through a sheaf of newly submitted poems before stuffing them in a satchel and going off – quite possibly at someone else’s expense – to a light luncheon at the Ritz.

  Naturally, there were other beneficiaries of Horizon’s success. One of them was Connolly himself. If the magazine gave him a platform and a wider range of contacts than he had previously enjoyed, then it also bolstered his personal prestige, opened up all kinds of avenues for him that had hitherto been closed off. To read Frances Partridge’s diaries from the 1950s, with their sightings of Connolly at dinner, or on holiday, or discoursing about books, is to appreciate just how very seriously he was taken, even by those who professed themselves sceptical of the seriousness with which he took himself. ‘I feel faint resentment at the way everyone lays out the red carpet for Cyril,’ Frances recorded at one point, ‘just because he seems to expect it.’ Neverthel
ess, she noted that she had exerted herself ‘to cook a reasonably good meal and please and flatter him’ because everyone else present clearly wanted him to be kept happy. Frances’s friend, Julia Strachey, too, can be found complaining about the ‘High Priest of Smarty Literature’, a lament in which annoyance and envy are inextricably bound up.

  None of this would have been possible without Horizon, without the grand obiter dicta about literature and its value, the lunches at the Ritz, the willing accomplices and, above all, the powerful mystique that rose above Connolly’s head like the scent of myrrh from the tomb. A cynic – Mrs Q. D. Leavis, say, who offered some choice remarks about the personal element in his work – would probably assume that Connolly’s literary ambitions were indistinguishable from his social aspirations, or rather that the one led naturally to the other, but this would be overstating the case. Anthony Powell, for example, left him out of his list of famous contemporaries (Waugh, Beaton, Betjeman, Quennell) who aimed to cut a figure in ‘smart’ society, on grounds that he simply could not suborn his temperament to the fashionable world’s demands. As Powell puts it, ‘Connolly’s inability to put up with sustained smart life largely owing to his own cantankerousness, even his intelligence, was to some extent a fact (on the whole doing him credit) that he could not mask such characteristics in himself, notwithstanding fantastic powers of ingratiation, if he desired to exercise them.’ Still, the suspicion lingered that he was happiest in the company of the well-born and the highly connected, and one of the funniest jokes ever played on him involved a group of friends out shooting in the north of Scotland parcelling up a dead duck and sending it south with a note that read, ‘With love from Lady Mary.’