“Horizon” Horizontales

D. J. Taylor -The Lost Girls: Love and Literature in Wartime London 

The New Criterion, February 1, 2020

A book’s index can entertain as well as inform, and in D. J. Taylor’s Lost Girls, a lively, perceptive, and gossip-strewn inquiry into an overlooked aspect of an influential corner of London’s literary life in, mainly, the 1940s, the index does not disappoint. Turning from “Horizon, ‘bugger incident,’ ” to the entries for that storied magazine’s creator and presiding genius, “Connolly, Cyril,” we find, among other accolades, “capriciousness,” “dilettante quality,” “double standards and hypocrisy,” “mother-fixation,” “self-absorption,” “self-destructiveness,” “self-propagating mystique,” “sulkiness,” “tactlessness,” and, in a final jab of the indexer’s finger, “vacillation and procrastination.”

Lost Girls is not, Taylor maintains, a book about Connolly. It is, he argues, focused on the women (“Connolly, Cyril: female coterie”) who “fizzed in his slipstream, the women whom at various times he employed, fell in love with, and very often schemed to marry, and over whom he cast a spell so prodigious that when he died, over three decades later, they came in relays to sorrow over his hospital bed.”

At this point, some readers might worry that Taylor has chosen the wrong subject. After all, apart from Sonia Brownell (who married George Orwell, and, in the post-war years, effectively ran Horizon while Connolly immersed himself in indolence and jaunts) the Lost Girls (Taylor concentrates on four, with asides on a few others) would merit barely a footnote in most histories, even as they linger on, in echo or caricature, in literature, a topic to which Taylor devotes a more than worthwhile chapter. In Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, Pamela Flitton, a character with quite a bit of Lost Girl Barbara Skelton about her, evolves into “a modern version of one of the Furies . . . keen on male company but determined to cause as much pain as possible.”

Back to the index, I reckon.

Another Lost Girl comes into view: “Parladé, Janetta (“née Wooley, then Slater, then Kee, then Jackson”), a scoresheet that sells Janetta short in the nomenclature stakes. She added a Sinclair-Loutit (while still married to Slater) by deed poll. Taylor corrects this omission in “A Note on Names” (much needed) at the beginning of the book.

It’s true that men—and this is something of a theme of Lost Girls—have an unfair advantage, in this case their ability to swap steeds on the marital carousel while camouflaged by a single surname. Connolly was married three times de jure, and a fourth de facto: “Koch, Lys”—another Lost Girl. Koch (“née Dunlap, then Lubbock”) replaced “Lubbock” with “Connolly,” but this too, observed Peter Watson, Horizon’s amiable proprietor, was “deed poll not the church!,” neither the first nor the last time that Connolly was to get away with, well, “vacillation and procrastination.”

Peter Quennell, a writer in Connolly’s circle (and who, years later, first coined the term “lost girls”) snagged five wives, including one lesser Lost Girl, and enjoyed a liaison with Skelton (“attracted to violence,” “beauty and allure,” “capriciousness,” “elusiveness,” “lesbian tendencies,” “multiple casual affairs,” “sulkiness”), a more prominent member of the tribe. Skelton subsequently married Koch’s Connolly and Parladé’s Jackson, just two of a long, long list of lovers that included Chas Addams and—of course—King Farouk of Egypt, one of the stars of the ridiculously readable pair of memoirs she wrote in the 1980s.

If all this sounds bewildering, it is. The entanglements running through Lost Girls can make a maze of Taylor’s narrative. They often overlap and can take years to resolve. Skelton left Connolly to marry George Weidenfeld (both Connolly and Skelton’s publisher, as it happens), but, “Just as Weidenfeld was cited by Connolly as co-respondent in the first set of divorce proceedings, so Connolly was cited by Weidenfeld in the second.”

In his “Note on Names” Taylor recognizes that the Lost Girls’ accumulation of surnames could be a source of “confusion.” As a result, he has “tended to refer to them simply as ‘Lys,’ ‘Barbara,’ ‘Sonia,’ and ‘Janetta.’ ” Taylor then adds an elegantly laconic listing of what “the cast” were up to in September 1939. For example, Sonia (the future Mrs. Orwell) is twenty-one and “Nicknamed ‘the Euston Road Venus.’ Involved in a relationship with the (married) artist William Coldstream.”

Julian Maclaren-Ross was in rather worse shape: “Author and former vacuum-cleaner salesman. Known for his erratic behavior. Living in near destitution in Bognor Regis.”

The word “cast” is a shrewd choice and maybe a dropped hint too. If ever there were a saga that ought to appeal to, say, a Netflix scout on the hunt for an upscale yet tawdry historical drama, this is it. Lost Girls features war, snobbery, high culture (and low), exotic locations (including, unexpectedly, briefly, and fatally, the North-West Frontier), beautiful women, death, sex of many varieties, and a vast and often bizarre dramatis personae that, when its members stray, tend to do so in the most intriguing ways. Given an extra boost by the fact that he is writing about people who wrote well, voluminously, and quotably, Taylor has conjured up an atmosphere ready-made for the camera, particularly in the wartime years that lie at the heart of Lost Girls. The bombs fell, and carnage lurked (“Connolly and Lys came across a severed hand lying in the street”), but, for those who could, the party went on.

This is not a book about Connolly in the way that a book about Henry VIII’s wives is not about that usefully miscreant monarch. Carefully and cleverly analyzed by Taylor, Connolly dominates Lost Girls in a manner that its nominal protagonists do not. He, writes Taylor, was “the fulcrum on which [the Lost Girls’] existence turned.” Their story cannot be understood without his, which is in and of itself a measure of the predicament faced by a group of intelligent, independent-minded, and unconventional women forced by convention—even in bohemia—and economic necessity into dependence on the opposite sex, a predicament that Connolly was able to exploit.

Connolly famously failed to live up to early expectations (“Whom the gods wish to destroy, they first call promising”). Even so, by the 1940s he had become, explains Taylor, “in terms of the rarified landscape through which he moved, a titanic figure, to be flattered, deferred to, and appeased . . . a grand literary panjandrum in a world where grand literary panjandrums mattered.” With Horizon as his vehicle, Connolly was “at the centre of the world that sustained him.” He was also its gatekeeper, and he let the Lost Girls in, but only on his terms.

The writers Connolly published, Taylor recounts, were “cut from his own cloth, which is to say men [and overwhelmingly they were men] of the same age and the same intellectual background” and—England was England—of the same class. Connolly was a product of Eton and Balliol. This may have been bohemia, but it was upper bohemia. Socially, the Lost Girls made the cut (very broadly, they were, to borrow Orwell’s analysis of his own pedigree, “lower-upper-middle class”), but—1940 was 1940—it was a pity about their gender. That said, Taylor’s description of these women as being “in varying degrees . . . handmaidens at [Connolly’s] court” is, even with the qualification (and with the exception of the unfortunate Lys, strung along and bossed about for years), an oversimplification.

To be sure, Connolly was no looker, but, like many sociopaths (a long-distance diagnosis, admitedly), he was highly manipulative and able, when he so chose, to turn on what Taylor refers to as “superabundant charm,” which was, in Connolly’s case, reinforced by a sprinkling of stardust. Some of the shenanigans surrounding his set have the whiff of a cult about them—a touch, perhaps, of Ayn Rand’s Murray Hill, but with more sex, more laughs, and less absolutism.

But in his depiction of the Lost Girls, Quennell rightly (for the most part) noted how they “valued their independence,” a word hard to square with “handmaiden.” They were “adventurous young women who flitted around London, making the best of any random perch on which they happened to descend.” In some of his phrasing, however—“flitted,” with all that conveys—Quennell comes across as both condescending and oddly unaware of the difficulties in finding a “perch” faced by women with little or no interest in doing what society expected of them. What used to “touch [his] heart was ‘their air of waywardness and loneliness,’ ” a superior sort of pity, especially when coming from someone whose tally of wives suggests that he too might have been on the wayward side himself.

Taylor offers no objection to Quennell’s description but, writing in a different era nearly four decades on, his view of the Lost Girls is considerably more empathetic and even enriched by some social anthropology (there are digressions on their appearance, on how they dressed, and on how they spoke). He also understands that the precariousness of their existence (“where the dinner at the fashionable restaurant gives way to the sleepless night in the unheated bedsitting room”) was not necessarily exclusive to the Lost Girls, even if they had to tread a trickier tightrope than many in their milieu. Rather it was characteristic of “a certain kind of war-era bohemian life in which glamour and sophistication and something very close to poverty [were] inextricably combined,” a mix, incidentally, that did not end on V-J Day: “the pawn” haunts Skelton’s account of her married life with Connolly, a marriage that began in 1950.

In trying to make sense of the curiously hectic quality of many of the Lost Girls’ sex lives, Taylor ranges from the general (such as changing moral attitudes and the intensity of wartime life) to the specific. Barbara, Janetta, Lys, and Sonia all, to a greater or lesser extent, had fractured and, in some instances, notably careless upbringings. It is not so surprising that Janetta became involved with Connolly when she was seventeen and he thirty-five, or that Barbara was kept by a millionaire friend of her father’s at the same age, or that the twenty-one-year-old Sonia’s boyfriend Coldstream was a decade older than she was. This did not, however, mean futures only as playthings: these Lost Girls were more resilient than that.

What they appeared to dread above all else was boredom. By opening the door to his world, Connolly offered them a chance to keep that menace at bay. It was an opportunity of which they took full advantage, if frequently unwisely and sometimes destructively—and not just to themselves (the ordeal of Janetta’s daughter, Nicky, to whom Lost Girls is dedicated, is partly described within its pages)—and, when occasion called for it, ruthlessly.

In the 1960s, the toughest, maddest, and wildest of all the Lost Girls briefly married Derek Jackson (a bisexual with—edging out Quennell—six wives in all, including a Mitford and a princess), who had earlier been stolen from Janetta by her half-sister, lesser Lost Girl Angela. Jackson was a noted physicist. He was also very rich.

“It was not for love that I married Professor Jackson,” commented Barbara.