The Lost Girls Page 9
Interlude: Mapping the Forties Scene
To talk of ‘literary life’ in the 1940s is faintly misleading. All that remains, three-quarters of a century later, is a number of different literary lives, of which the world inhabited by Connolly and his friends was only one – and that, some neutral observers would argue, not the most important or long-lasting. If the 1940s are the decade of Horizon, then they are also, in no particular order, the decade of neo-Romantic poetry, of Eliot’s Four Quartets, of dozens of crowd-pleasing middlebrow novelists such as Hugh Walpole and J. B. Priestley, whose books outsold anything that Connolly ever put his name to by a factor of fifty to one. Occasionally these categories overlapped – both Walpole and Priestley contributed to Horizon’s opening number; Connolly, too, in his New Statesman reviewing days, had been an astute critic of such undemanding middle-of-the-road fiction as came his way. At other times, though, the gap between a metropolitan sophisticate and a provincial journeyman, between a bestselling novelist and a recherché little magazine poet, between the prescriptions of highbrow taste and the books with which ordinary readers beguiled themselves on trams and trolley-buses could show every sign of developing into an abyss.
We can see something of the myriad, differing constituencies which forties literature addressed by tracking Orwell’s progress through the decade. The Horizon regular; the literary editor of the left-wing weekly Tribune; the BBC producer; the Manchester Evening News and Observer reviewer; the pamphleteer; the polemical columnist . . . All these varying ports of call contributed something to the literary persona that he constructed for himself in the ten years before his death, and separating out the ‘real Orwell’ from this routinely overstuffed workbook is impossible: no such thing exists, and the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four was as much at home lunching with a left-wing Labour MP – Michael Foot, say, with whom he enjoyed cordial relations – as chatting to Connolly about their time at prep school. The same point could be made of Evelyn Waugh: happy enough to allow Connolly to shepherd his novella The Loved One into print in 1948, but eternally suspicious of the avant-garde artists and the translated foreigners that were a crucial part of the Horizon offering, more likely to be seen executing prestige commissions for Sunday newspapers or taking part in religious debates in the Catholic press.
As for what gave Connolly his power, his celebrity, his paralysing influence on upper-brow taste in the 1940s, then the explanation was at least as much social as straightforwardly literary. Critics of the Connolly line – an increasing number as the decade proceeded – usually begin by asserting that in any enterprise to which he put his hand the aesthetic waters have been muddied by affiliations that are, essentially, located in class, that the boundary between the people Connolly printed in his magazine and the people with whom he dined and with whom he had been to school and university was faint to the point of invisibility. Certainly, Connolly’s circle at this time can seem horribly homogenous. Scarcely anyone who turned up, manuscript in hand, at the Horizon office or made his bow at one of Connolly’s parties had failed to attend a public school: Connolly, Watson, Orwell and Brian Howard were Etonians; Spender had been to Westminster; Quennell to Berkhamsted; Waugh to Lancing College. Most of them – Orwell was the exception – were Oxford graduates. None of this made them upper class by the standards of the time – Waugh was a publisher’s son from Hampstead, Orwell’s father, Richard Blair, had retired from the Indian Civil Service on a pension of £600 p.a. – but it was a key factor in the almost imperceptible closing of ranks that sometimes distinguishes bygone literary life, the suspicion that a poet or a novelist or a short-story writer is being judged not by the quality of his metrics or the suppleness of his prose, but on whether or not he happens to be ‘one of us’.
The literary forties are full of symbolic illustrations of this divide, of extraneous talent being welcomed into the exclusive palisades of Horizon or John Lehmann’s New Writing only to quail before some of the social assumptions on display. Shortly before her death in 1941, for example, Lehmann persuaded Virginia Woolf to allow him to print the text of a lecture entitled ‘The Leaning Tower’, given to the Brighton branch of the Workers’ Educational Association. Here the author of Mrs Dalloway and The Waves spoke loftily of writers occupying ‘a raised chair’, of benefiting from gold and silver, of relishing their detachment from the workaday world: ‘to breed the kind of butterfly a writer is you must let him sun himself for three or four years at Oxbridge or Cambridge’. The former miner B. L. Coombes, who complained of Woolf’s snobbery, was himself rebuked by Lehmann. To an Old Etonian, whose first job had been working as the Woolfs’ assistant at the Hogarth Press, inclusiveness could only go so far. Or there is the salutary tale of Sid Chaplin, another pitman with literary aspirations, encouraged by Orwell (who printed his stories in Tribune) and invited to call should he happen to be in London. Arriving at the very modest maisonette that Orwell shared with his wife Eileen in Kilburn, NW6, Chaplin discovered that a party was in progress on the other side of the front door. Unable to face the metropolitan sophisticates who lurked within, he turned on his heel and fled.
Thirty or even twenty years before, this kind of thing would have passed without comment. But there was a new kind of criticism beginning to establish itself, one less respectful of established reputations, more inclined to interrogate the social underpinning of the work brought before it. Q. D. Leavis – never afraid to name names – had already produced a pioneering essay entitled ‘The Background of 20th Century Letters’, in which Connolly’s Enemies of Promise and the memoirs of Logan Pearsall Smith, Edward Marsh and Louis MacNeice were glacially appraised. How to obtain literary preferment in England? According to Mrs Leavis, the ‘odious little spoilt boys of Mr Connolly’s schooldays move in a body up to the universities to become inane pretentious young men, and from there move into the literary quarters vacated by the last batch. Those who get the jobs are the most fashionable boys in the school, or those with feline charm, or a sensual mouth and long eyelashes.’ What gives this assault its kick to anyone in the know is the fact that the final phrases are a direct quotation from Connolly’s account of Brian Howard in his Eton pomp. ‘The advantages Americans enjoy in having no Public School system, no ancient universities etc., can hardly be exaggerated’, she crossly concludes.
Even more than Connolly, Brian Howard (1905–58) would come to be regarded as the villain of the piece, the self-regarding flibbertigibbet whose spectacular lack of success seemed not to have occurred to his well-placed friends, endlessly cosseted and indulged in the hope that he might someday write the masterpiece of which everybody assumed him to be capable. ‘Today the gentlemen are on the defensive,’ Connolly’s old adversary Julian Symons wrote in 1972, ‘but there are still reasons for being miffed about (to take a small instance) the seriousness with which a book about the talentless Brian Howard, talentless perhaps but amusing, and one of us, was recently treated.’ The book in question was Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster’s Brian Howard: Portrait of a Failure (1968), a remorseless 600-page compendium of narcissistic play-acting and serial non-achievement, and, as Symons points out, respectfully received by many a newspaper arts critic.
It was Connolly himself who came up with the adjective that still tends to attach itself to the style that he and his friends championed in the era of the Blitz, the Normandy landings and the Attlee government: ‘mandarin’, which to a Leavisite would have meant detached, ironic and de haut en bas. Come the 1950s, the epoch of Angry Young Men, of ‘Movements’ and grammar-school boys on the make, the mandarins would be in sharp retreat, driven back by the provincial, middle-class tide that produced novels like Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) or Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People is Wrong (1959). A decade later, they were museum pieces. But here in the 1940s, Connolly was a genuine literary power-broker, a grand panjandrum, a maker – and breaker – of reputations. And if one part of his attraction to the Lost Girls – Sonia in search of her great man, Lys in search of s
ecurity and a settled home life – was his status, then another lay in his familiarity, his ability to shape up to the requirements of their caste. The process worked both ways. Highly individual and distinctive personalities Lys, Sonia, Janetta, Barbara and the others may have been, but like Brian Howard each of them was also ‘one of us’.
4.
‘Skeltie darling . . .’
Wake up. Foul mood. Detest myself.
Barbara Skelton, diary entry, 12 October 1941
Everything about you interests me and makes me miserable.
Peter Quennell, letter to Barbara Skelton, 1 January 1943
There are several direct routes into the chaotic and impulsive world that Barbara Skelton inhabited in the early 1940s. One is to take a specimen week in her life and examine the extraordinary degree of emotional complexity it seems to have produced. Here she is, for example, drifting through the last few days of 1941. On Christmas Eve her boyfriend Peter Quennell – one of several contending admirers – invites her to dinner with Connolly and Lys. The evening is not a success, largely due to the posturings of the host: ‘Cyril always manages to create a strained atmosphere, which is a pity’, Barbara records in her diary. For her own part, she feels ‘self-conscious and shy’. There is a plan for the party to reconvene the following day for Christmas lunch, but in the morning Lys arrives at the tiny flat in which the pair of them are holed up to rescind the invite. Then, towards the end of the festive period, possibly even on New Year’s Eve, there is another supper with Connolly (‘Cyril seems more human as he was not being a host at one of his own dinners’) and Augustus John. Everything seems to be going well until, back at the flat where she and Quennell are preparing for bed, another boyfriend, the artist Feliks Topolski, turns up unexpectedly. A terrible row ensues, which ends with Quennell smashing a flower vase. ‘What a hideous New Year! What exhaustion; what depression!’ Barbara laments the next morning. Her low spirits are not improved by Quennell’s somewhat arch attempts to cheer her up: ‘Oh! Poor thing. Oh! You pretty little thing. You poor dainty pretty’, he is recorded as saying. Barbara’s diary entry ends with the single word ‘Ugh!’
Quite a lot of Barbara, it turns out, is gathered up in this single wartime week: the eternal dissatisfaction; the multiple relationships; the attendance on the great and good; the self-doubt; the sense of existing at the centre of a gigantic emotional mess which it is beyond anybody’s ability to disentangle. Another route lies in her highly autobiographical first novel, A Young Girl’s Touch (1956), which tracks her erratic progress through the Second World War. Barbara, who features as ‘Melinda Paleface’ and of whom it is said that ‘she was far too young and pretty to live in London alone’, is first seen working at the offices of a continental government in exile, where she devotes her mornings to ‘doing her face or making dates by telephone with all her friends and admirers’ and her evenings to being entertained by them at a variety of West End restaurants and backstreet nightclubs.
An unabashed freeloader (‘Someone was always there to take Melinda out to dinner’), equally in her element lunching at the Berkeley Hotel or attending blue-movie screenings in Chelsea, her fatal attraction is ascribed to a trick of cupping her chin in her hands and staring abstractedly into the distance to create ‘an air of elusiveness that men found irresistible’. At the same time, the deep wells of private unhappiness in which her boyfriends so regularly tumble make her captious and spiteful. Plus, as she frankly concedes, she has a habit of falling for a succession of men every bit as unreliable as herself. Despatched to ‘Jubaland’ (a thinly disguised Egypt) as a cipherine – a cipher clerk – she is taken up by the local potentate ‘King Yoyo’ (an even less thinly disguised King Farouk) who delights in thrashing her with a dressing-gown cord. ‘Nothing was ever as black as it seems,’ Melinda reflects at the close of her tragi-comic picaresque. ‘The entire course of our life can change completely at a moment’s notice.’
That was certainly true of Barbara, whose abrupt changes of emotional tack became legendary among the people who witnessed her making hay with her countless admirers or were unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of one of her drop-of-a-hat disappearances. ‘Her attachments being multifarious and multiple,’ as one despairing suitor put it, ‘. . . she could conclude a tiff by walking out of a morning to reappear after some days and re-establish herself, as of right, to be off again at the arising of friction.’
If A Young Girl’s Touch falls into the category of ingénue confession – one of those engaging books in which a stream of hair-raising events is recounted with a comparatively straight face – then by the time of its appearance Barbara had spent nearly two decades up to her neck in the kind of life it so carelessly describes. Skelton père was a regular army officer who had married an Edwardian chorus girl and in doing so alienated himself from grander relations. There was Danish blood – the source of Barbara’s ravishing good looks – an ancestral connection to Sheridan, and a germ of temperamental excess that led her aged four to attempt to run her mother through with a carving knife. ‘It is doubtful if she had much love for her child’, Barbara later reflected. Sent to a convent school from whose disciplinary regime it was thought she might benefit, she was expelled in her early teens for forging a series of love letters to herself signed ‘Fred’. All attempts to constrain or otherwise subdue her having failed, she was allowed, aged fifteen, to leave home and live in a London YWCA hostel.
Like her alter-ego Melinda, Barbara was far too young to be left to her own devices. The first of her many admirers had been an Armenian uncle, the husband of her mother’s sister Vera, who had arrived in her bedroom one night to plunge a hand down the front of her nightdress and, when out driving, invited her to search for sweets in his trouser-pocket. A guards officer who picked her up in Hyde Park and inveigled her to a louche hotel in Leicester Square was narrowly repulsed. Then, aged seventeen, she was seduced by a millionaire friend of her father’s, who took her for a weekend to Brighton and afterwards set her up in a flat in Crawford Street, Marylebone. All the customary trappings of the poule de luxe swiftly descended on her teenaged head – an allowance, a Bechstein piano, a fur coat, high-end foreign travel. On her eighteenth birthday, she looked out of the window to see a chauffeur parking a sports car at the kerb. In this equipage she was driven around Europe, taken to stay in Paris (‘A suite at the George V. Champagne lunches at Fouquet’s. Afternoon drives in the Bois. Shopping in the rue de Rivoli. Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère’) and brought back to London for a discreet nursing home abortion. Most girls in her position would have stuck out for what they could get. Barbara, being Barbara, ended the affair out of sheer lassitude. Bored by the routines expected of the rich man’s mistress, she took to modelling for the high-class couturiers Schiaparelli and Hartnell (‘Schiap’, she always thought, appreciated her ‘as my dimensions conformed to the hourglass silhouette’), pining for the bohemian life while acknowledging that whatever society she fell into would always fall short of her expectations of it. Like Melinda, ‘for years she had longed to get away into the unreal world of London. Now that she had done so, happiness still seemed far out of reach.’
All this raises the question of milieu, the kind of world Barbara inhabited in her twenty-something heyday and the kind of people she encountered in it. On one level, naturally, it is the sort of existence sketched out in the famous chapter in Vanity Fair entitled ‘How to Live Well on Nothing a Year’, in which a suit of finery or a three-course dinner is all the more enticing for being subsidised by somebody else. It was also a world of stratospherically differentiated removes, in which the Ritz Hotel and the rat-haunted bedsit, the flyblown country cottage and the out-of-season continental resort all play their part, and the next significant other is as likely to be a half-starved painter as a cheque-book wielding millionaire. What stopped her from being a kept woman, pure and simple, was her irritation, her refusal to play any emotional game that failed to suit her highly exacting tastes. Michael
Wishart, who knew her in the 1950s, noted that ‘she had a tantalising quality of needing a tamer, while something indefinable about her indicated that she was untameable’. Significantly, the most common complaints raised in her boyfriends’ letters were not so much of bad behaviour (though there was certainly plenty of that) but sheer unreliability. Where are you? Why haven’t you phoned? Why didn’t you meet me when you said you would? And so, unremittingly and incriminatingly on.
The Skeltons made one final effort to bring Barbara to heel, or at any rate to secure some kind of plausible future for their wayward daughter. Sometime in the mid-1930s, as a cadet member of the tribe of orient-bound inter-war era spinsters known as the ‘fishing fleet’, she was sent to India to find a husband. The visit took place under the auspices of her Uncle Dudley, who after a distinguished army career had reached the rank of general in the Royal Army Medical Corps. No one suitable could be found, but there was an inevitable besotted young officer named Charles Langford-Hinde who, on her return to England, was discovered to have stowed away in her cabin. Barbara obligingly kept him hidden for the first part of the voyage, smuggling in food and barring the door to strangers, but on the third day out a message came through from army headquarters at Poona and once the ship docked at Aden he was taken off in close arrest. Each of the parties in the romance went home in disgrace: Langford-Hinde to a court martial and banishment to the North-west Frontier, where he died in an ambush by rebel forces led by the Fakir of Ipi; Barbara to a wrathful j’accuse from Uncle Dudley, who had written to her father complaining that she was a disgrace to the family and he never wished to see or hear from her again.
The Indian episode seems to have played an important part in Barbara’s private mythology, a tantalising lost past she ached to revisit, part of the person she imagined herself to be. Quennell remembered her telling him ‘the story of the young man who stowed away on the boat back from India’. There were carefully preserved photographs of Langford-Hinde and of Barbara herself at the time of her Indian adventure, wearing jodhpurs with a half-grown leopard at her feet. Quennell, suspecting embellishment or downright invention, wondered quite how much of the story he ought to believe, but it was a fact that Barbara’s voice when she related it and described how, from the rail, she had watched Langford-Hinde being taken off the ship ‘was muted, wistful and remotely sad’.