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 mixing’, 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.’ Nevertheless, 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.’
Here in early 1940, most of this lay in the future. Meanwhile, for all his newfound celebrity as the impresario of a successful literary magazine, Connolly’s personal life was, once again, in tatters. A man newly reconciled with a wife who had spent much of the previous year living apart from him might have thought twice about employing his mistress in the office where both of them worked, but sometime in the spring Diana – now adjudged to have recovered from her injuries – took up residence behind a desk at Lansdowne Terrace. Most of her work involved appraising manuscripts according to the approved Connolly code – ‘no good at all’, ‘doubtful’, ‘good’ and ‘outstanding’. Although Jean had disappeared to stay with friends at Malvern Wells – Connolly seems to have left Yeoman’s Row to stay at a hotel in Charlotte Street – there were, as yet, no indications that she meant to leave him for good. Judging from the letter in which she proposes a triangular arrangement (‘Why don’t you and Diana take a cottage in the country and I’ll come and stay and we’ll all be high-minded and Bloomsbury and the best of friends’), she was still trying to make the best of a bad situation. Not long afterwards she made a new will in which Connolly featured as sole legatee and indicated that she wanted to give him half her annual income for the rest of her days. But the shades were drawing in around Connolly’s married life, and in June she left for Dublin (‘It is beginning to sink in how very far I am going and for how very long’) and then for America. Even here, though, Connolly’s powerful magic still worked its effect. ‘Darling, darling heart, don’t grieve,’ runs her valedictory letter. ‘I love you and will write you every week and will come back to you.’
Horizon, too, was on the move, a casualty of events taking place across the Channel. Hitler’s assault on France began in the second week of May 1940; by 14 June, a fortnight after the British Expeditionary Force’s retreat to Dunkirk, there were Nazi troops in Paris. As the fear of invasion grew, Peter Watson decided to lease a house at Thurlestone Sands on the south Devon coast where he, Connolly, Diana and Spender could conduct the magazine’s business far away from the threat of war in the comfort of remote, provincial England. Despite the attractions of a hired car and a live-in cook, the relocation was not a success. Connolly spent most of what was intended as a working holiday sulking in his room and complaining about the lack of things to eat and the general inconvenience of being detached from his professional beat. Early in August, Watson informed his friend Cecil Beaton that ‘on the 16th the lease is up and HORIZON may move to a famous tropical garden near Dartmouth’, but this seems to have been ironic: clearly his editor pined to be back in London, and by the end of that month the editorial team were back in Spender’s flat at Lansdowne Terrace.
Connolly, who would otherwise have been homeless, took a furnished apartment high up in Athenaeum Court, Piccadilly, an address so exclusive – Watson lived in the same block – that it was assumed that his patron was paying the rent. It was a time when the realities of war, generally evaded in Horizon’s guilt-ridden editorials, became sharply apparent. The London Blitz began on 7 September, watched by Connolly, Orwell and their friend Hugh Slater, from the Piccadilly eyrie. Lansdowne Terrace was hit (‘Our office has been bombed and we have been without telephone for three weeks, but we are carrying on’, Watson told Beaton.) And then, just as the bombs began to fall, Connolly’s emotional life was plunged once more into crisis. Diana, still smarting from the unpleasantness of Thurlestone Sands, resolved to go on holiday on her own. As ever, when threatened by a disturbance in his personal circumstances, Connolly did all he could to forestall it. Threats of suicide; dire warnings of the likely effect of abandonment on his creative powers; interventions from mutual friends: all these were tried and failed. Alone in the furnished room at Athenaeum Court, Connolly was forced to face up to the regrettable fact that both wife and mistress had thrown him over in the space of three months.
It was at this point that the circles in which Connolly and Lys moved began to overlap. The Lubbocks knew Spender. They were also friends with a young student of the Royal College of Music named Natasha Litvin. The Lubbocks’ flat in Great Ormond Street boasted a grand piano, to which Natasha was allowed access. One Friday towards the end of August, at almost exactly the same time that Connolly returned from the west country, Tony Hyndman, the bisexual Spender’s former boyfriend, dropped by to invite the Lubbocks to lunch on the following day. After some persuasion at the hands of the voluble Hyndman (‘Oh come on ducky, you’ll love it’), Natasha decided to join the party at Lansdowne Terrace. Here her innocent eye fell ‘wonderingly’ on the various possessions that Spender had left lying around the office, the small Picasso that hung on the wall, the outsize gramophone, the shiny ebony desk, the records in their sleeves. Ian Lubbock introduced her to Spender, and the evening ended with the pair of them having dinner in a nearby Italian restaurant. Natasha, as she readily conceded, had ‘never met people like this before’. The experience was that of being admitted into ‘a totally new life’.
Meanwhile, two other people were heading rapidly down the same route. If Connolly and Lys did not meet at Spender’s party, then they were introduced to each other shortly afterwards. Certainly, they were on the way to becoming an item by the autumn of 1940, by which time Lys and her husband had moved to a flat in Holland Park. A letter from her around this time brings news of domestic tension (‘Ian has been shouting & screaming at me all morning’), canvasses a scheme for Connolly to get her a job on Horizon, offers him lodgings while the Lubbocks are away and hatches a plan for a rendezvous: ‘I could have lunch with you tomorrow – if you would like that.’ ‘Everything seems to be so hopeless darling,’ Lys lamented, ‘but perhaps when I get back we shall have come to some decision.’ Clearly husband and wife agreed to separate, for when, in the early part of 1941, Connolly moved into a studio flat at Drayton Gardens, SW10, rented from Celia and Mamaine Paget (‘I have the Paget twins’ house’, he grandly informed Alan Pryce-Jones), Lys came with him.
What was Lys like, and what, aside from her startling good looks, did Connolly find to admire in her? The most obvious answer is that she admired him. (‘People say she is dull,’ Connolly is once supposed to have remarked about a woman he was pursuing, ‘but she is interested in yours truly, and that is what yours truly likes.’) At the same time, it takes only a glance at Lys’s letters to establish the allure of her personality. Lively, affectionate and dutiful, she was, and continued to remain, a magnet for the opposite sex. Men fell in love with her almost on the spot: years later Connolly can be found complaining about the entourage of male admirers he (wrongly) imagined her to be encouraging. There were complaints about her tendency to prattle and her ‘silliness’, but her occasional gaucheness seems to have stemmed from an anxiety to please, a deference to the interests of the people around her that, in a world of super-egos and male peacocking, strikes an odd note of humility.
What did the parties to this transaction want from it? Connolly, fresh from his dealings with Jean and Diana, seems to have been fascinated by the regard of an exceedingly pretty woman who not only admired his intellectual brilliance but appeared happy to organise his somewhat chaotic domestic life. Lys, it is fair to say, saw something that her marriage to Ian Lubbock had apparently lacked: a future, a man she respected and for whom she pined to create an environment in which he could feel at home. And so the revolution in Connolly’s existence that took place at the end of 1940 was as much administrative as emotional. Lys cooked for him, she arranged luncheons for his friends and relatives, she hired an accountant to explore his complicated finances, did calculations on his behalf and, by submitting details of his entertaining expenses to the Inland Revenue, seems to have ensured that he paid virtually no income tax. The end in view, as she was happy to admit, was a settled relationship, leading to marriage. But this, as she also conceded, was always likely to be complicated by the emotional turmoil that Connolly liked to create around himself.
As soon as Cyril decided he wanted something, he wouldn’t rest until he had it. And he was very good at making you feel guilty for not giving him what he wanted. Like a child, he would beg and beg, and then when you gave in, his attention would go to another thing. Sometimes I think he only really loved me when he thought he was losing me. There were endless scenes.
It was inevitable that some of Lys’s organisational skills should be brought to bear on the tangled and resolutely ad hoc arrangements of the Horizon office. Until now, most of the routine administrative work had been carried out by a floating population of part-time staff. Bill Makins, the original business manager, had disappeared into the army. At various times over the first year-and-a-half of the magazine’s existence, secretarial duties had been performed by Diana, a ‘Miss Warren’, a woman called Liza Mann and a young man barely out of his teens named Michael Nelson. Janetta occasionally helped out and appeared at parties. Far more experienced in the realities of office life than her predecessors, Lys not only brought her managerial skills to the environment in which Connolly conducted his professional life but doubled up as his social secretary. When Spender and Natasha decided to get married in the spring of 1941, the wedding party was held at Drayton Gardens under her supervision.
Tolerant of Connolly’s foibles, anxious to make the paths he trod run smooth, ever humble and almost infinitely pliable, Lys was prepared to put up with a great deal, in particular the expansion of the Drayton Gardens ménage to include the free-loading Quennell, who had previously been lodging at the flat in Holland Park, and Connolly’s protégé Arthur Koestler, a deserter from the French Foreign Legion who had arrived in England after a torturous escape from North Africa and then joined, and been discharged from, the Pioneer Corps. Although there was plenty of space, the premises harboured only a single bathroom. Each morning, with the late-rising Connolly still fast asleep, Lys looked on with amusement as Quennell and Koestler contended for the first bath.
The Drayton Gardens lease expired early in 1942; it was Lys who found a new flat for Connolly at 49 Bedford Square, with a spacious drawing room for entertaining and an attic where the ever adaptable Quennell swiftly established himself. Here and there in the diaries and letters kept by the literary figures of the 1940s come glimpses of their domestic life together. One visitor who warmly approved of Lys was Evelyn Waugh, not least for her ability to overcome the sumptuary privations of the war. ‘On Friday I lunched with Christopher and Camilla [Sykes] and dined with Cyril Connolly,’ runs a letter to his wife Laura from September 1943. ‘His mistress loves me still. Nancy there too. Truffles and lobsters.’ Six months later he could be found telling Lady Dorothy Lygon that ‘Cyril Connolly and his delightful mistress give dinner parties which I enjoy very much but it always means walking home from Bloomsbury’. The man in the attic was more circumspect, amused by Connolly’s airs and finding his companion slightly irritating. A site report from early September 1943 notes that ‘at Bedford Square existence is still fairly tranquil: but Cyril is at his most sensitive and Lys – in the role of The Mouse at Bay or Battling Minnie – has been getting slightly on my nerves’. The sharp-eyed Quennell also detected in Connolly a growing sense of his own importance, a determination to live in a way commensurate with his status as an arts-world power-broker: ‘Cyril and Lys continue to live a life of conjugal sybaritism, getting up at 12 and entertaining large parties of the intelligentsia, with a slight vanilla flavouring of the nobility and gentry.’
As ever, Connolly’s state of mind in the war years oscillated wildly. On the one hand, his star was in the ascendant. The move from Drayton Gardens to the comparative splendour of Bloomsbury seemed to symbolise his newfound status. (‘Cyril . . . has taken an enormous flat in Bedford Sq. and is very much on the up-grade’, Diana informed her brother.) But however much he enjoyed the benefits of being the editor of a highly regarded literary magazine, he was also restless, dissatisfied with his lot and looking out for fresh opportunities. One promising new sideline came his way early in 1942, when his friend David Astor, proprietor of the Observer, appointed him as the paper’s literary editor. The salary was £800 a year and the duties minimal, but Connolly’s time in Fleet Street was not a success. There were rows with the Observer’s editor, Ivor Brown, and an eventual falling out with Astor, who thought the books pages too abstruse and was annoyed by Connolly’s habit of criticising him behind his back.
Worse, the end of his Observer contract in the summer of 1943 was immediately followed by his fortieth birthday. Connolly took the anniversary hard: a symbol of lost youth; an impenetrable barrier separating him from the consolations of the past. The Unquiet Grave, the manuscript on which he was currently at work, a selection of pensées infused with the elegiac note of classical myth, is a kind of casebook of accidie, full of inner disquiet and intensely realised longing for days gone by. Years later, Lys would tell him that the only time she had seen him ‘completely happy’ was when he was working on it. Simultaneously, the days passing by the window at Bedford Square were full of danger. ‘This, as you’ve probably read in the papers, is SECRET WEAPON WEEK,’ Quennell told one of his correspondents in June 1944. ‘Pilotless planes whizz over the house-tops.’ While Quennell affected to be relatively unmoved by the sight of a V1 hurtling over the London rooftops (‘It just goes bowling thro’ the sky, explodes and there you are’), he reported that Connolly and Lys (‘exceedingly buzz-bomb conscious’) took refuge in a shelter they had constructed beneath the stairs. The slimline Lys ‘fits in as neatly as a maggot into a pea-pod’; her overweight consort, on the other hand, reminded him of a large rabbit trying to squeeze into a rathole.
If Lys was not always on hand in the Horizon office – she was called up for war work in 1942 and spent nearly two years working as a secretary in the Political Intelligence Department – then she was a constant presence in Connolly’s life, dealing with his affairs, presiding over his entertainments and, it has to be said, running his bathwater and cooking his breakfast. Three years into their relationship, it was still her ambition to marry him, and yet if this feat were to be accomplished, several outsize hurdles had still to be negotiated. One of them was legal, for at this stage in the proceedings both editor and consort were married to somebody else. The other was Connolly’s inertia, his deep-seated reluctance to be persuaded into a decisive step, and the obvious satisfaction he got from letting things drift. Some progress was made in 1944 when Lys secured a divorce from Ian Lubbock (Connolly was named as the co-respondent), while Connolly went so far as to inform Jean that unless she returned to England or said that she intended to he would institute proceedings himself, but the turn of the year offered two highly symbolic instances of the way in which Connolly regarded his long-term girlfriend and the role she might play in his complicated existence.
The first was publication of The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus, brought out in a limited edition of 1000 copies under Horizon’s own imprint before being reissued by Hamish Hamilton. ‘Palinurus’ was the pilot of classical mythology, appointed by Aeneas on his voyage from Troy to Italy, who fell asleep, was swept ashore and murdered by savages. His body was left unburied, and when Aeneas visited the underworld he was petitioned for formal interment by his shade. Lys had helped to type Connolly’s manuscript, and yet at least one of his friends interpreted the project as little more than a long-drawn out complaint about the world he now inhabited: ‘half commonplace book of French maxims, half a lament for his life,’ Evelyn Waugh suggested. ‘Poor Lys; he sees her as the embodiment of the blackout and air raids and rationing.’
The second instance was Connolly’s trip to post-war Paris, undertaken alone, in which he seems to have been treated as a paladin of English literature hastening back to salute the culture he had been compelled to forsake during the four years of Nazi occupation. (‘We’ve had C. Conelly [sic] for three weeks in the house,’ Lady Diana Cooper, the wife of the British Ambassador, reported back to Waugh, ‘being feted as though he were Voltaire returned.’)
It would have been scant consolation for Lys to be asked to reassure Peter Watson that he was missing nothing – ‘it is not the Paris we knew but an unreal city’ – for most of his friends suspected that he had been vastly enjoying himself: his letter to Lys, as Diana pointed out to Janetta, ‘sounded as though he’d had the most wonderful time’. Neither, perhaps, would Lys have been impressed by news of Connolly’s recantation of his original view and a wholesale surrender to the delights of French literary life that led to the entire July 1945 number being filled with contributions relating to Sartre, Valéry and other manifestations of French genius. Most ominous of all was an observation that she never got to see – a line in a letter that Quennell, still vigilant in the Bedford Square attic, confided to a friend in November 1944. Connolly, he adjudged, ‘is, I fancy pretty bored – but not so bored as to wish to put out onto the wide dark seas of a new adventure’. For Lys, who fussed over his wardrobe, who organised Connolly’s parties and haggled for black-market food to delight his friends, the next few years would bring only stasis, frustration and ever diminishing returns.