‘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 life 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’.
While most of A Room in Chelsea Square’s carefully contrived plotlines come to nothing – the magazine never takes shape, Ronnie ends up supervising the Gladiator’s women’s page, Nicholas is thrown over by Patrick in favour of a good-looking shop assistant – then there is a dreadful fascination about the relationship between Ronnie and his highly attractive girlfriend, ‘Lily’. Patronised and dominated by him (‘Ronnie’s slave girl’, according to Patrick), lined up to act as his secretary when the magazine launches, Lily is thought to be ‘much too beautiful for that slug Gras’. Nicholas’s friend Michael wonders, ‘How has someone as hideous as Ronnie managed to get hold of someone so beautiful?’ There is a ghastly evening chez Gras which begins with Lily bounding out of the drawing room at Ronnie’s call and executing drinks orders at his direction. Michael, offering to lend a hand in the kitchen, is told that Ronnie wouldn’t approve. As well as officiating as secretary, Lily has also been recommended for the magazine’s business side, as Ronnie imagines that her salary can be put towards his household expenses. According to Patrick, an amused spectator, ‘I’m sure Michael’s just the boy to lick the stamps which Lily is going to put on all those letters you’re going to write.’ Ronnie’s final words after dinner are a condescending: ‘You can lock up now, Lily. I shall go and work in the study. You needn’t wait up for me. Breakfast about eleven, I think.’
The suspicion that on his journeys around Lansdowne Terrace, Nelson saw scenes like this being enacted is enhanced by an exquisitely awful moment in which Ronnie wakes up to find that Lily has placed a bunch of grapes by his bedside. Asked if she would hold them for him (‘I find it so tiring to the arm’), Lily dangles them before his open mouth and then wipes his face with a napkin. At bath-time Lily wonders: would he like to play with his boats today? ‘Of course. But you’re not to refer to my tummy as a sandbank.’ Underlying this badinage lurks the thought that Lily’s personality has been squashed flat by Ronnie’s treatment. When Michael contrives to sleep with her, in Patrick’s flat, the experience is a sad disappointment. ‘It had been like going to bed with a corpse. Every ounce of vitality must have been squeezed out of her long ago by Ronnie.’ Lily’s confession of her infidelity produces an even ghastlier exchange:
‘You don’t want to leave me?’
‘Oh, no, Ronnie.’
‘Then you’d better go and see about lunch. I don’t know whether I shall be able to eat much. You’ve probably ruined my digestion. You’d better concoct some particularly light and appetizing dishes.’
By the time that Horizon limped to a close at the end of 1949, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford had been swapping jokes about Connolly and his entourage for nearly half a decade. ‘Smarty-Smarty’; ‘Smarty’s Own Mag’; ‘Mrs Bluefeet’; ‘Mrs Barefoot’: no letter exchanged between Nancy’s Parisian eyrie and Waugh’s Gloucestershire fastness seems to have been complete without its teasing reference to the cultural panjandrum of Bedford Square. It was not that the teasing came to a halt in the post-war era, rather that it had a different focus and was recalibrated to include fictional re-castings of Connolly as well as straightforward mockery. The most obvious aspect of the novels that Waugh and Mitford published in the decades after the war which relate in some way to Horizon is their sense of complicity, the thought that both writers are working from a store of allusions and jokes laid down years before, picking up batons that will be handed on again further along the track.
And so Nancy’s The Blessing (1951) – dedicated to Waugh – seems to carry on where her letters left off. Grace, its heroine, has two suitors, one of them an Old Etonian theatrical impresario named ‘Ed Spain’. Known to his friends as ‘the Captain’ or ‘the Old Salt’, Spain is described as a ‘charming, lazy character’, keen on his food and French wines, whose ambition is to make enough money to lead ‘the life for which nature had suited him, that of a rich dilettante’. There is also a punning joke about his keen blue eyes, which ‘looked as if they had been concentrated for many years on a vanishing horizon’. As a taste-maker and highly rated intellectual presence, he has accumulated a band of acolytes, ‘clever young women all more or less connected and more or less in love with the Captain’. Spain calls them ‘My Crew’ and leaves the management of his theatre increasingly in their hands, ‘a perfect arrangement for such a lazy man’. The Crew have such hifalutin names as ‘Oenone’, ‘Ulra’, ‘Fiona’ and ‘Phaedra’ and inhabit the Captain’s rambling house on the river, where they do the housework, living in the attics and the cellar, ‘which no servant would have tolerated for a moment, but which the clever Captain had invested with romance’. The girls themselves are punctiliously described:
They looked very much alike, and might have been a large family of sisters; their faces were partially hidden behind curtains of dusty, blonde hair, features more or less obscured from view, and they were all dressed alike in duffle coats and short trousers, with bare feet, blue and rather large, connected to unnaturally thin ankles. Their demeanour was that of an extreme sulkiness, and indeed they looked as if they might be on the verge of mutiny. But this appearance was quite misleading, the Captain had them well in hand; they hopped to it at the merest glance from him, emptying ash-trays and bringing more bottles off the ice.
As for their political views, following Waugh’s earlier remarks about Connolly’s ‘Communist young ladies’, Mitford notes that they ‘could not be the clever girls they were without seeing life a little bit through Marxist spectacles’. Put to work on a communist play translated from ‘some Bratislavan dialect’, they sit about ‘in high-necked sweaters, shorts, and bare, blue feet, their heads bowed and their faces entirely obscured by the curtain of hair’.
In The Blessing, Connolly masquerades as a theatre manager. In Waugh’s Unconditional Surrender (1961), the final volume of his Sword of Honour trilogy, he reappears as ‘Everard Spruce’, who conducts a magazine named Survival, funded by the Ministry of Information, and lives ‘in a fine house in Cheyne Walk, cared for by secretaries to the number of four’. Spruce, who wears Charvet shirts and a bow tie, is said to display ‘the negligent elegance of a fashionable don’. The significance of Waugh’s portrait of Spruce and his entourage lies in its deliberate echoes of Mitford’s sketch. A visitor to his house remarks on the bohemian get-up of the girls.
The secretaries were dressed rather like him though in commoner materials; they wore their hair long and enveloping in a style which fifteen years later was to be associated with the King’s Road. One went bare-footed as though to emphasize her servile condition. They were sometimes spoken of as ‘Spruce’s veiled ladies.’ They gave him their full devotion; also their rations of butter, meat and sugar.
The secretaries have names such as ‘Frankie’ and ‘Coney’. Frankie, the bare-footed one, offers a cocktail made of South African sherry and ‘Olde Falstaffe Gin’ and tells one of the guests that it is a relief to meet ‘a real writer instead of all these smarties Everard wastes his time on’. The Survival office (‘a smaller room austerely, even meanly furnished’) adjoins Spruce’s drawing room. Here, when not engaged on domestic tasks, ‘the four secretaries stoked the cultural beacon which blazed from Iceland to Adelaide; here the girl who could type answered Spruce’s numerous “fan letters” and the girl who could spell corrected proofs’.
Naturally, some of the situational details are exaggerated – at no time were Lys, Sonia and Janetta all working and living together under the same roof – but there seems little doubt that Waugh and Mitford were using them as models. That Waugh, who owed Connolly many a professional debt, felt guilty about this cannibalising process is clear from a letter he wrote him shortly after Unconditional Surrender was published. Here Waugh professes himself ‘greatly annoyed’ to see that reviewers have attempted to identify Horizon with Survival.
That magazine was the creation of the Ministry of Information. Horizon, of course, was Watson’s benefaction. It is true that you had a semi-literate socialist colleague, but he was not ‘Spruce’; still less you. As for the secretaries, Lys was beautifully neat and, as I remember her, Miss Brownell was quite presentable. Some time later you had a bare footed landlady but (surely?) she had no part in Horizon and very little part in the delightful parties you gave. The whole identification is a fantasy.
Waugh’s defence would have seemed much less disingenuous had he and Mitford not spent long years exchanging injurious gossip about Connolly framed in exactly the same language as their novels. Meanwhile, Sword of Honour harbours another Lost Girl, whose career Waugh follows in some detail. This is Guy Crouchback’s first wife Virginia Troy, a once stylish ornament of the beau monde, who, by the time the insinuating Lieutenant Trimmer comes across her in a Glasgow hotel in the early part of the war, is badly on her uppers. Trimmer is aware of a woman in her early thirties, dressed in clothes that two years ago had come from a grand couturier, ‘with all the requisites for attention, who was not trying to attract’. Virginia’s latest man, she explains, has just disappeared: ‘He’s a sailor. I haven’t known him long but I liked him. He went off quite suddenly. People are always going off suddenly nowadays, not saying where.’
How has Virginia come to be the person she is? Like Barbara, she turns out to have been seduced by a friend of her father’s, ‘who had looked her up, looked her over, taken her out, taken her in, from her finishing school in Paris’. There follows marriage to Guy, a second marriage to his replacement, Tommy Blackhouse, and then a succession of sugar daddies: ‘London hotels, fast cars, regimental point-to-points, the looming horror of an Indian cantonment; fat Augustus with his cheque-book always handy; Mr Troy and his taste for “significant people . . .”’ Only the here and now has meaning: ‘It was the present moment and the next five minutes which counted with Virginia.’ Later passages dwell on her feeling of isolation, the younger brother with whom she ‘never got on’, now dead in the war, a stepmother (‘She never approved of me and I can’t get at her now’) living in Switzerland. It is said of her that ‘Whatever the disturbances she had caused to others, her own place in her small but richly diverse world had been one of coolness, light and peace.’ From the day of her marriage to Guy and desertion of Mr Troy until her meeting with Trimmer, ‘she had achieved a douceur de vivre that was alien to her epoch; seeking nothing, accepting what came and enjoying it without compunction’. Significantly, when she dies in a doodlebug blast, it is left to Spruce to pay tribute to a life in which half-a-dozen real Lost Girl lives seem to have been gathered up: Virginia, he tells Frankie and Coney, ‘was the last of twenty years’ succession of heroines. The ghosts of romance who walked between the two wars.’
Waugh, Mitford and Nelson were using the Lost Girls as ammunition in their satirical war against Connolly, useful evidence in a campaign to expose what they regarded as his bogus side, his vanity, self-absorption and ability to surround himself with impressionable acolytes who lacked sufficient cultural knowledge to stop themselves from a wholesale swallowing of the Connolly myth. But there were other novels of the period in which the Lost Girl takes centre stage, ceases to be a satirical instrument and becomes something more enduring – a behavioural enigma, a psychological puzzle for the author to fret over, particularly if, as occasionally happened, the author had his own emotional scars to display.
Getting wind of Patrick Balfour’s plan to write about his failed marriage, Waugh was unimpressed. ‘He is trying to write a novel about Angela,’ he informed Nancy early in 1948. ‘It won’t be any good.’ Reporting back on the finished product early in 1950, he was slightly, but only slightly, more emollient. ‘Poor Patrick has written a novel in praise of Angela. Quite good about her but the rest Forsyte Saga.’ The real significance of The Ruthless Innocent (1949), it might be argued, lies in its back-dating. Rather than giving it a contemporary setting, Balfour emphasises his heroine’s spiritual attachment to the pleasure-seeking world of the Bright Young People by placing most of the action in the period 1928–31. Like the Balfours, the Heriots are aristocratic Lowland Scots, their family prestige assured by a tyrannical grandfather. Martin, his grandson, a painter-aesthete in line to inherit the barony after his older brother’s death in the Great War, has an entrée into smart bohemia by way of his interior-decorating chum ‘Ozzie’. It is in Ozzie’s Bruton Street shop that he first sets eyes on Angela’s alter-ego, ‘Sally’.
Several passages dwell on Sally’s guilelessness, her apparent naivety, her stunning good looks (‘Her eyes glowed with pleasure. They were large and deep and blue’), her love of such sensual diversions as lying in the sun, and her complete inability to resist an emotional impulse. Her childlike qualities are repeatedly emphasised: she is said to have a child’s head on a woman’s body, to talk without expression – ‘it was a child’s voice which has not yet developed its tone’. This air of sexy infantilism is enhanced by her ingenuous vocal style. ‘It’s nice and cuddly,’ she observes of her white fleece coat. ‘I call it my little lambkin.’ Sally’s early life is as rootless as her current existence and includes an unknown father, an actress mother who abandons her in childhood and a fleeting career on the stage. After coming across her at a country weekend, where, in the approved Bright Young Person manner, she has stationed herself ‘under an apple-tree on the brink of the lawn, dressed as an Austrian peasant girl’, Martin has no trouble in pressing his suit. ‘What lovely things do happen!’ Sally remarks before consenting to come and live with him in Cheyne Walk.
Simultaneously, there are family pressures at work, in the shape of Martin’s parliamentary father and his stockbroking Uncle Kenneth. Sally, we swiftly infer, is not just a glamorous halfwit but a symbol of inter-generational tension. Like many a mid-century novel by an erstwhile Bright Young Man, The Ruthless Innocent soon declares itself as a battle between the old world and the new, between duty, heritage and the family fortune, and love, living for the moment and pleasing yourself. But Martin, however besotted by his girlfriend, drawing and painting her endlessly in the studio at Cheyne Walk (‘The child’s head on the woman’s body, the cloudless face with its intent, still eyes, continued to fascinate him’), is ever more conscious of Sally’s lack of emotional ballast. The story of their romance, consequently, is largely the story of his efforts to work out what is going on in her head. After carefully logging her relish for film magazines, her fixation on a succession of actresses whose looks she aims to replicate, her susceptibility to passing whims – learning the guitar, getting a dog – he concludes that she is a ‘nomad’ for whom none of the conventional rules in life apply, for whom stray impulses and fleeting attractions will always mean more than long-term plans.
One senses that Martin, like his long-suffering creator, is deeply bewildered by Sally/Angela, cannot understand why she behaves as she does or clings so desperately to a life without strings at a time when, with family money lost in the 1929 crash and Uncle Kenneth’s firm enmired in scandal, his own existence is increasingly subject to upset. There is a rather ominous moment when, after their marriage and the birth of a son, Sally laments the number of relations the child will acquire: ‘I’m beginning to think that relations are rather nice to have, if they’re dead or you don’t have to see them.’ Martin demurs. For a short time the idyll continues in a Cap Ferrat villa owned by Ozzie’s rich American friend Mrs Sprint. But once again the tocsin of familial obligation is clanging in the shape of Martin’s Aunt Susan, who lives in the hills nearby, and a discussion as to whether the newly married couple should join her. Vagrant spirit Sally fears being tied down (‘It’s nice to be able to go away and know you’ll never come back’) and, when told that you can’t always be on the move, counters with the claim that ‘It’s exciting not to know at all where I’ll be or what I’ll be doing this time next year.’ Then, when Susan falls ill and Martin is summoned to her bedside, Sally allows herself to be squired off to Venice by his Uncle Geoffrey. ‘Darling, darling M,’ runs the letter conveying this unexpected news, ‘I have had to go with Geoffrey. I tried very hard but simply couldn’t help it . . . when something like this happens to one there’s nothing else to be done, I couldn’t not go with him.’
Martin’s sense of bafflement is brought to boiling point by a final meeting in Paris, where – Uncle Geoffrey having been quickly thrown over – Sally arrives in the company of an Italian admirer named Giovanni. Her explanation – if explanation it is – echoes the relevant passages in Angela’s memoirs, a hankering for excitement coexisting with a wish to carry on with existing arrangements: ‘I feel as if I don’t want a safe sort of life all the time, like before. But I feel just the same about you as I always did.’ When Martin, not unreasonably, objects that ‘Sally, you must know. Being unfaithful’s not just something that happens to you, like having measles. It’s something you decide to do or decide not to do.’ Like Angela, Sally instantly returns to her default position: the ungovernable impulse, impossible to resist, in whose grip she is simply swept up and borne unhesitatingly away: ‘With Geoffrey, it just seemed to happen.’
If Sally/Angela is simply unfathomable, a kind of elfin sprite wandering a lost pre-war world and mostly unaware of the havoc she causes, then the Lost Girl psychology on display in Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time has an altogether different focus. For Pamela Flitton, first glimpsed in The Military Philosophers (1968), then found contemptuously making hay of the Labour MP Kenneth Widmerpool in Books Do Furnish a Room (1971), and finally coming to the immensely sticky end that Barbara had predicted for her in Temporary Kings (1973), is not a romantic figure but a modern version of one of the Furies – brusque, vengeful and utterly uncompromising, keen on male company but determined to cause as much pain as possible. ‘Giving men hell is what Miss Flitton likes,’ someone shrewdly diagnoses early on in her career. A wartime boyfriend maintains that ‘She’s cross all the time. Bloody cross. Thrives on it. Her chief charm. Makes her wonderful in bed. That is, if you like tension.’ The air of icy deliberation that she carries around with her, together with her casual attitude to sex, is confirmed by a character named Bob Duport: ‘I only stuffed her once. Against a shed in the back parts of Cairo airport, but even then I could see she might drive you round the bend, if she really decided to.’
Given that Books Do Furnish a Room contains at least two men who are driven to distraction by Pamela’s goings-on, this strikes a prophetic note. In one of the journals written in his old age, Powell notes Barbara’s conviction that she ‘is’ Pamela, but the life into art projections of his novels are rarely straightforward. It is not that Pamela is an unvarnished portrait of Barbara; rather, that Powell mingles some of Barbara’s characteristics and incidents from her life with a fair amount of invented material to produce something which, though hugely exotic, contains enough traces of the original to alert the reader to its grounding in some kind of lived existence. There is, for example, no physical resemblance. (Pamela is described as ‘one of those girls with a dead white complexion and black hair’.) Neither does Pamela pursue any of Barbara’s employments. When first glimpsed by Dance’s narrator Nick Jenkins in The Military Philosophers, she is an ATS driver. Although, like Barbara, she is transferred to Cairo, she ends up working for ‘a secret service outfit’. Simultaneously come hints that Pamela’s capacity for causing trouble is of far higher order than the dawdling siren turning up late every day at the offices of the Yugoslav government in exile. After being mixed up in ‘a rather delicate situation’ with some Free Poles, then withdrawn from driving duties after her car goes missing, her conquests include ‘two RAF officers . . . court-martialled as a consequence of a fight about which was to drive her home after a party’, a Lieutenant Commander given ‘a severe reprimand’ and a Treasury official who gives her a lift in his car at Richmond Station, thereby ‘starting a trail of indiscretions that led to his transference to a less distinguished ministry’.
There is even a hint that her powers may be practically diabolic. When the clairvoyant Mrs Erdleigh tells her fortune one night, as the displaced residents of a block of flats gather in a basement while bombs fall overhead, even this practised overseer of female destiny is shocked: ‘You must be careful, my dear . . . There are things here that surprise even me.’ On the other hand, another of Pamela’s distinctive features – her complete indifference to the age and status of the men she decides to fascinate – brings her closer to the early 1940s version of a Barbara who once declared that her male ideal was the thickset actor Erich von Stroheim. She is, Nick tells us, ‘just as happy deranging the modest home life of a middle-aged air-raid warden, as compromising the commission of a rich and handsome guards ensign recently left school’. Then there is the matter of her procedural attack, ‘the unvarying technique of silence, followed by violence, with which she persecuted her lovers’. Like Barbara, she has an infallible trick of sniffing out male weakness, picking a significant other’s vulnerable spot and twisting the knife. ‘You don’t think I’m going to take orders from a heel like you?’ she tells Odo Stevens, her escort on the night when Mrs Erdleigh examines her palm. ‘You’re pathetic as a lover. No good at all. You ought to see a doctor.’
What does Pamela want? An obvious answer would be power: the power to ensnare and humiliate, revenge herself on men who have failed to match her exacting standards, a category in which all members of the male sex can be thought to repose. Even if what Jenkins calls her ‘iciness of manner’ is a constant, then, as he acknowledges, ‘there was no denying she was a striking girl to look at. Many men would find this cosmic rage with life, as it seemed to be, an added attraction.’ Even the normally prudent Widmerpool, when despatched to Cairo on War Office business, is no match for her wiles: ‘He managed to make a fool of himself about some girl . . . She was absolutely notorious.’ Transferred – as Widmerpool’s wife – to the snowbound English winter of 1946–7, the setting for Books Do Furnish a Room, Pamela shows an unexpected side. Her first appearance, escorted by her hapless husband, is at Thrubworth, where members of the family of Nick’s wife Isobel have gathered for the funeral of her brother Erridge. But the obsequies are only a secondary consideration to the much more pressing problem of what makes Pamela tick.
Observing her at close quarters for the first time, and struck as ever by the ‘pent-up sullen beauty’, Nick tries to establish what marks Pamela out as more than just a beautiful girl. Perhaps, he muses, it lies in ‘her absolute self-confidence, her manner of expressing without words that to be present at all was a condescension’. There is a revealing scene in which, feeling ill during the service and retiring to the house, she chatters tersely to Nick: ‘Are Kenneth and those other sods on their way here? The Kraut got me some tea.’ Nick looks on as Siegfried, the German prisoner of war employed at Thrubworth, and the deceased’s Uncle Alfred stand staring at her, ‘expressing in their individual and contrasted ways boundless silent admiration. Her contempt for both of them was absolute. It seemed only to stimulate more fervent worship.’
There is a final pièce de résistance when, taking ill again on her way out of the house, Pamela is violently sick into an antique Chinese vase. Is she pregnant, somebody wonders. Nick decides not: ‘I think it was just rage.’ Much of the novel, established in the literary London of the immediate post-war era, takes in the founding of a literary magazine called Fission – much more left-wing and ‘committed’ than Horizon – and it is here that Pamela comes into her own, extending her reputation for extreme bad behaviour yet revealing some hitherto unsuspected artistic interests. Again, Powell can be found elaborating the scope of a landscape he had observed at close hand in the late 1940s for the purposes of fiction. One of Fission’s contributors is the writer ‘X. Trapnel’, transparently a version of the dandy-novelist Julian Maclaren-Ross, who was one of Connolly’s early discoveries. The particular object of Maclaren-Ross’s desire among the Horizon staff was Sonia, so much so that Maclaren-Ross was eventually banned from the office. Here, Trapnel confesses to Nick that he is in love with Pamela: ‘I’m mad about her. I’d do anything to see her again.’ Arriving at the Widmerpools’ flat one night, Nick discovers that Trapnel and Pamela have eloped together.
Again, Nick struggles to understand Pamela’s motivation. Why has she gone off with the deeply unreliable and narcissistic Trapnel? Why, if it comes to that, did she marry the vainglorious and self-obsessed Widmerpool? The only explanation he can find – practically cosmic in its implications – is that ‘She had done it, so to speak, in order to run away with Trapnel’. These ‘two unique specimens’ – husband and lover – ‘as it were brought into collision, promised anarchic extremities of feeling of the kind at which she aimed, in which she was principally at home.’ All this, naturally, returns us to Barbara and her dealings with Quennell: ‘I like things to be difficult.’ But Pamela, we soon discover, regards her relationship with Trapnel as far more than a means of taunting her husband. Holed up with her paramour in a dingy flat in Maida Vale, she takes a keen but critical interest in his work-in-progress, a novel entitled Profiles in String, informing Nick, who chances upon them there, that she is ‘not satisfied’ with its merits. Neither, it turns out, is she satisfied with Trapnel. Coming back along the towpath of the Regent’s Park Canal from the pub in which Trapnel reveals that she has abandoned him, Nick and his friend Bagshaw stumble upon the evidence of her parting shot: the pages of Profiles in String floating in the water.
Powell is not quite done with Pamela. In Temporary Kings, still married to Widmerpool and still giving off that ‘instant warning of general hostility to all comers that her personality automatically projected’, she turns up at a cultural conference in Venice in the company of an American publisher named Louis Glober. By now the aura of notoriety that envelops her has darkened to include necrophile involvement in the death of a French intellectual named Ferrand-Seneschal (‘the implication is that she was in bed with this Frenchman after he was dead’); her own death, in equally doubtful circumstances, is not far off. By this stage Pamela has lost her grounding in Barbara’s comparatively modest exploits of the 1940s and become something not far short of a figure in classical mythology, a kind of elemental force, malign and unappeasable, beholden to no one but herself.
If Barbara’s appearance in A Dance to the Music of Time involves the application of almost infinite layers of malevolence, not to mention some coruscating special effects, then Sonia’s part seems much closer to her real life function at Horizon. In Books Do Furnish a Room, she can be identified as ‘Ada Leintwardine’, a doctor’s daughter said to be ‘keen on making a career in . . . the world of letters’, and employed as secretary to Sillery, the elderly and intrigue-ridden Oxford don. Ada, as Nick describes her, is ‘in her twenties, fair, with a high colour, a shade on the plump side, though only enough to suggest changes in the female figure then pending’. Capable, industrious, with a faintly bossy side, Ada moves on to work at Quiggin & Craggs, the publishers of Fission, where she rapidly wins golden opinions. As Bagshaw remarks, echoing what was said about Sonia in Horizon’s last years, ‘Ada’s the king-pin of the whole organisation. Maybe I should say queen bee. She provides an oasis of good looks in the office, and a few contacts with writers not sunk in middle age.’ But while Ada is only a minor attendant on Dance’s thronged and constantly evolving cast, there is another novel – possibly the most famous work ever produced by one of Connolly’s satellites – in which Sonia is always supposed to play a starring role. This is Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, published a bare four months before she became the second Mrs Orwell in October 1949.
To Hilary Spurling, her biographer, Sonia is transparently ‘Julia’, the ‘girl from the fiction department’, who spends her working hours in a government office helping to produce pornography for impressionable proles and her leisure hours conducting a doomed affair with Winston Smith. Anxious to begin on the novel’s second draft after a hard winter’s journalism, Orwell, according to Spurling, returned to Jura in the spring of 1947 with the aim of ‘recreating’ Sonia as Julia and a determination to ‘take her as his model’. Certainly, Sonia would have been in Orwell’s mind at the time he resumed work on Nineteen Eighty-Four: why else would he have invited her to visit him? Watching her enter the room in which the two-minute hate is being staged, Winston sees
a bold-looking girl of about twenty-seven, with thick dark hair, a freckled face and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
In fact, Julia’s age is later given as twenty-six (Sonia, by the time that Orwell invited her to Jura, was twenty-eight). Much is made of the contrast between her youthful zest and Winston’s advancing decrepitude: ‘I’m thirty-nine years old. I’ve got a wife that I can’t get rid of. I’ve got varicose veins. I’ve got five false teeth.’ Orwell, at the time he first asked Sonia to marry him, would have been forty-three. Later on, Winston notes that ‘Except for her mouth, you could not have called her beautiful.’ Like Sonia, she has a forceful demeanour, is said to ‘burst’ into rooms, and has a briskly assertive vocal style that stops only just short of bossiness: ‘I do voluntary work three days a week for the Junior Anti-Sex League. Hours and hours I’ve spent pasting their bloody rot all over London. I always carry one end of the banner in the processions. I always look cheerful and I never shirk anything.’ Unlike Sonia, she is resolutely unintellectual, ‘didn’t care much for reading’ and falls asleep while being entertained with selections from Emmanuel Goldstein’s critique of the Oceanian regime, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism.
There are circumstantial factors, too, which might call this identification into question. One is that Orwell had started thinking about Nineteen Eighty-Four well before his re-encounter with Sonia in 1946. Another is that he had asked several other women to marry him at this time: it might equally be the memory of Anne Popham or Celia Paget that he carried back with him to Jura. A third is that, with the exception of Winston’s opening remarks and one or two speculations about Julia’s interior life (‘She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life . . . She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated . . . She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead’), we learn very little about her, how she operates as a human being and what goes on in her mind. However attractive to ageing, moth-eaten Winston, there is a way in which she is more important for what she symbolises – youth, rebellion, free-spiritedness – than for what she actually is.
To Spurling, Sonia is not merely a physical presence in Nineteen Eighty-Four; she is also a decisive influence on its intellectual framework. In July 1946, for example, she wrote a long Horizon review of Les amitiés particulières, a novel by the French writer Roger Peyrefitte which turns on the friendship between two boys at a Catholic boarding school. The book reawakened all Sonia’s hostile memories of her own upbringing, and the strategies of treachery, betrayal and what Orwell would have called ‘doublethink’ that she imagined to lie at Catholicism’s heart:
When you have seen through [this] world you can never become its victim, but can fight it with the only unanswerable weapon – cynical despair; when you have learned the lesson of the double vision, action and emotion are equally meaningless. This is the heritage of Catholic education . . . one which those who went to Catholic schools always recognize in each other, members of a secret society who, when they meet, huddle together, temporarily at truce with the rest of the world, while they cautiously, untrustingly, lick each other’s wound.
While there is no proof that Orwell ever read the issue of Horizon in which this appeared, Spurling thinks it ‘hard to write off as coincidence the fact that, at the very moment when he started work on Nineteen Eighty-Four, his ex-mistress outlined in print precisely the scenario that would become the central section of his plot’.
Certainly, Nineteen Eighty-Four was properly begun no more than a month after these lines were written (Orwell told his friend George Woodcock in August 1946 that he had ‘just started’ another novel). And certainly, whether Orwell read it or not, there is a clear connection between the ‘double vision’ and ‘doublethink’. On the other hand, a trawl through the journalism Orwell was writing in the period 1944–6 suggests that the possibility of a link between the Christian Church and secular dictatorships had been exercising his imagination for at least two years. One might note his unpublished review of Harold Laski’s Faith, Reason and Civilisation, written for the Manchester Evening News in March 1944 but rejected, or so Orwell assumed, for its ‘anti-Stalin implications’. Laski’s book is an attempt to square his belief in democracy and freedom of thought with his conviction that the highly authoritarian Soviet Union is ‘the real dynamo of the Socialist movement in this country and everywhere else’. According to Orwell, Laski does this by drawing an analogy between the USSR and Christianity in the period of the break-up of the Roman Empire; Soviet socialism ‘aims at the establishment of human brotherhood and equality just as single-mindedly as the early church aimed at the establishment of the Kingdom of God’.
In the end, Orwell rejects Laski’s analogy as false, but there are several other meditations of this kind in the journalism he produced towards the end of the Second World War, and his attempts to equate religious faith with left- and right-wing forms of autocracy go at least as far back as 1938. Meanwhile, there is another reason for wondering if, in the end, the girl in the fiction department is the girl in the Horizon office. O’Brien, the member of the Inner Party whom Winston believes to be his saviour, is ultimately revealed as an agent provocateur; Winston’s rebellion against Big Brother is a put-up job; there is at least a suspicion that Julia is O’Brien’s willing accomplice, primed to entice Winston into a net of subterfuge whose eventual consequence will be his re-education at the hands of the Thought Police. If Nineteen Eighty-Four is a love letter from Jura to a girl left behind in London, then one of its overriding messages is that in the end the people we love will betray us.