I felt the need for a closer look. In keeping with my state of mind I thought that rather than fleshing out my knowledge of Cyril Connolly and his times I would go straight to the heart of the matter which I found in a review in the Guardian of The Lost Girls, Love, War and Literature, 1939-1951 by D.J. Taylor, published in the U.K. by Constable. It was Mrs. Connolly I was interested in first. I read The Lost Girls, and as I was finishing it, not having sated my appetite for wife number one, I ordered The Wonton Chase, [not about Chinese restaurants], by Peter Quennell, merely because the review of Lost Girls said that the latter book owed it's concept to the Quennell book. (You'd think I was getting paid for this!)
You have to discover the girls bit by bit as you read through a short bio of Connolly's youth and the history of his great magazine, which begins just a little before the start of WWll and ends in 1950. To simplify that, the girls are, in something like order of appearance, Jean Bakewell, Lys Lubbock, Janetta Wooley, Barbara Skelton, Sonia Orwell, Glur, (Joyce Warwick Evens), Angela, (Janetta's half-sister), Diana Witherby, Joan, daughter of Viscount Eyres-Monsell), Anna Kavan, (pseudonym of the writer Helen Emily Woods), and a few lesser mortals.
Before I go any farther, though, and before we enter the world of Cyril himself, which it seems I've decided we must do, it should be understood that in those days particularly, on the other side of the great pond and in the neighborhood of London, and outside the lower classes of Great Britain, homosexuality, (although it was illegal), was thought of in a different way than it ever was in the United States, up to and including the present time. Starting in the public schools, which, [for those of you in Petaluma], are what Americans call private schools, and which had a more rigid social hierarchy than anything known in the U.S., with Eton, [along with Harrow], being at the very tip-top of the pyramid, public school boys had flirtations, crushes and romances with each other in a way that was both accepted and, if closeted, kept only from the lower classes, that including the entire bourgeoisie.
The extensive Wikipedia entry for Cyril Connolly broadened my sense of the impact that Connolly had on his times. I learned that his father was a retired British Army officer and that his parents had separated early in their relationship; they lived for a time in South Africa, and his father undertook, as an amateur scholar, a study of Mollusks. The parents weren't wealthy but both sent him the occasional small check which combined with the income from an occasional review enabled him to travel almost continually. If you are really interested in his complete meanderings I suggest the Wikipedia Post, which is remarkable in its length and depth.
When exactly it was that he jumped the rail to hetero isn't quite clear, but he had done well by his Eton and Oxford youth in terms of the social connections he made. Actually his fortunate friendships began at St. Ciprian's, the private boarding school he attended before Eton, the "Public" version of a private grammar school in the States. It was there that he became friends with George Orwell and Cecil Beaton. Connolly excelled academically all through Eton while making many friends that were helpful to him later on, although most are people I'm not familiar with, not being a full-fledged Anglo-phile, but I'll drop a few names anyway; Denis Dannreuther, Bobbie Longden, Roger Mynors, Anthony Knebworth. He also, in his last year, was elected to the most exclusive club at Eton, Pop. (Perhaps I should look up where that name came from?) At Oxford he did equally well making friends, including Nico Davies, about who's family I've written a bit; Teddy Jessel, Lord Dunglass and Brian Howard.
He left Balliol College, Oxford with a degree in history and went for a vacation in the French Alps with friends. He took another trip in the autumn to Spain and Portugal. In April of '26 he took a job tutoring a boy in Jamaica, and set sail in November. He returned the following Spring, and found a post, (something slightly different then a job), as secretary/companion to Logan Pearsall Smith, a successful writer and discrete homosexual. Smith, born in the U.S., was the son of Robert Pearsall Smith, a prominent Quaker and glass manufacturer in New Jersey. Robert and his social prominent wife Hannah, it was her family that owned the glass business that Robert became manager of, had become involved in a movement within the Methodist church called the "Holiness" movement, and had risen to become internationally famous speakers and teachers. In 1875 though, Robert was accused of some sort of inappropriate behavior by a female American writer that had been part of an initiation ceremony he was conducting. An evangelical tribunal followed, and though details were not revealed, Mr. Smith was finished as a speaker. After that, he "lost his faith, withdrew from public gaze and spent most of the rest of his life as an invalid." [Wikipedia] Why an invalid I haven't discovered, however, in 1888 the Smith family moved to England to be with their daughter who had married an Irish Barrister. (The same daughter later married Bernard Berenson.) Another daughter, Alys, married Bertrand Russell, and Logan, as mentioned, became a writer.
Logan gave Cyril eight pounds per week for his secretary-companionship services even if one or the other was off visiting a third party. Much of his time was spent at Smith's Hampshire home, "Big Chilling", which was a gathering place for kindred spirits, including Desmond MacCarthy, the literary editor of the New Statesman. At Big Chilling Cyril continued to broaden his growing friends-of-influence list.* In June of 1927 he submitted his first signed work for the New Statesman, a review of the work of Lawrence Sterne, and in August he was invited to join the staff. In September he wrote a review of The Hotel, by Elizabeth Bowen. Now, with a possibly regular income, he was able to afford a share in a flat, and moved in with a friend, Patrick Balfour.* Through Balfour he met more friends (Bobby Boothby* and Gladwyn Jebb)* who were helpful in introducing him around London and Paris. And, at around this time, he began taking an
interest in women, with a couple of minor infatuations, and then, in
Paris, (this is from Wikipedia), "...he met Mara Andrews, a poetic
lesbian who was in love with an absent American girl called Jean
Bakewell."
He stayed in touch with Mara, (the poetic Lesbian), and some months later he arranged to meet her and the returned American girl, and they had some discussions, and fairly quickly decided to marry. A bit seems to be missing here, for which I searched fruitlessly; how he switched his sexual attraction from men to women and jumped into a marriage with a heretofore practicing lesbian, but, it does seem to have worked for both of them for a decade at least and they continued to love each other even after they were long separated.
Having come from the New York State Public School system in the post-war period, it's hard for me to imagine Eton, or Oxford, or any of the types of friendships Cyril had, (although I did have as a friend my Godmother's nephew Julien, who had gone to Eton; discussed in another post.) I began to wish I was more prepared for what seemed to be turning into a study of the man and his times. I had read The Lost Girls, and the Peter Quenelle book, the Wanton Chase, and so I picked up Cyril's Enemies of Promise and read it, and one of several biographies of Cyril that are available, Michael Shelden's Friends of Promise.
There is just no substantial record of the courtship between Jean and Cyril, so it gets put down in Wikipedia and the couple of reviews I've read as sort of a wam-bam thing. But they must have gotten to know each other a little more leisuredly than that. Cyril did in fact get to know Jean and Mara as a couple. And they introduced him to their bohemian friends in Montparnass. It was through them that he met Alfred Perles and Henry Miller as well as James Joyce, who he later wrote a piece about, titled The Position of Joyce, which appeared in Life and Letters. Then, abruptly, Connolly and Bakewell went off alone to Spain together and met up with Peter Quennell. Perhaps this is when the transfer of affections took place. But there is no record of any hurt feelings on the part of Mara.
They were married in April of 1930 in the U.S. They were both 26 years old. With financial help from Jean's parents they immediately began traveling in comfortable style, mostly along the Mediterranean coast. When in London they lived at various places and were even welcomed for short stays at Big Chilling. After a few months they settled, for awhile, near Toulon, where their neighbors were Edith Wharton and Aldous Huxley.
They were a messy pair though, very poor housekeepers and encumbered with a number of exotic pets; ferrets, lemurs, an African genet. Neither Huxley nor Wharton warmed up to the couple, nor did Virginia Wolfe, when they briefly stayed with her; she found Cyril uncouth and coined the name Smarty-boots for him, which led Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford to refer to him as "Boots", in the many funny letters they wrote to each other over the years.
In 1932 he got a rare paying assignment from John Betjeman at the Architectural Review to write some art criticism. (It was through Betjeman he met Waugh, with whom he developed the funny teasing back and forth that they maintained for years.) Later that year though, Jean fell ill and had what must have been a hysterectomy, though no specific operation is given that I could find.
On a recuperative trip to Athens, there was a coup d'etat, which Cyril wrote up for the New Statesman with the title "Spring Revolution". While in Greece they met up with a gay couple, Brian Howard (another Eton contemporary), and his boyfriend, and took a side trip to Spain, where the four were involved in a fight in a bar and were arrested. They were bailed out by the British Embassy. ...That summer, on the advice of Enid Bagnold, (author of National Velvet and former lover of Frank Harris), they rented a house at Rottingdean.
During 1934 Connolly worked on Humane Killer, The English Malady and
The Rock Pool, a trilogy of novels of which only The Rock Pool was
finished. By 1935 Connolly's father was no longer to help him out financially, but
Jean's mother continued to do so, paying for a trip to Paris,
Juan-les-Pins, Venice, Yugoslavia and Budapest. In Paris he again met
with Henry Miller and his publisher Jack Kahane and developed a strong
rapport with Miller. (Kahane published The Rock Pool, the following year, to no appreciable acclaim.)
By 1936 he had had a couple of brief affairs, (or flirtations), and then in late 1937 he became involved with Diana Whitbey, and it became serious. Jean seemed quite tolerant about it, she was after all a determined Bohemian, and she began to spend time in the South of France without Cyril but in the company of their mutual friend, a wealthy heir to a margarine fortune and a respected collector of modern art, Peter Watson, who lived with his homosexual lover, an American named Denham Fouts. This is where Cyril began to develop his style of playing lovers, (and friends), off each other. He explained to Jean that he was suffering low self-esteem, (perhaps using other terminology), from being supported by her, that he wasn't able to write his novel, (he was blocked), and that he felt horribly guilty and needed Jean to beg and plead for him to come back. (He needed to be needed.) Here is a bit about Diana from Michael Shelden's insightful biography.
"Like Jean in 1929, she [Diana] was a bright, attractive student with boundless curiosity about anything connected with the arts. She was twenty-two, twelve years younger than Connolly, and when he met her she was preparing to enter the Chelsea School of Art as a student of painting. ...she came from a conservative, upper-middle-class English family which had operated a printing firm in London for many years. She had been brought up at her parents' country home in Hampshire and had received a conventional education at a fashionable boarding school in Kent. Connolly was charmed not only by her beauty and intelligence but by her innocent enthusiasm for art. Her dream of becoming a painter inspired him to think of her as both a muse and a fellow artist with whom he could share his life. ..."
In 1938, Connolly followed up The Rock Pool with a book of non-fiction, Enemies of Promise. The first part of the book is a brilliant dissertation on the difficulties of maintaining popularity in the literature-as-art market place. Following that is a short autobiography, covering mostly his school days. In it he
attempted to explain his failure to produce the literary masterpiece
that he and others believed that he should have been capable of writing. The book was a surprise hit.
In the meantime, with himself in the middle, he played off the emotions of Jean, Diana, and Peter Watson. When Enemies of Promise came out, he had persuaded Jean to come back, she was living with him, and he was deeply involved with Diana.Then Jean went back to Paris, and he pleaded again for her to come back. She told him that Watson thought they should maintain their separation for a while for the good of both of them.
In September The War began. Jean realized that if she was ever going to see the States again she'd better go back soon. Watson realized that he couldn't stay in Paris and collect art, that he'd have to return to his own country; that his options were running out. Eventually, Denham Fouts and Jean took the same boat back to the U.S. The next time Cyril asked Watson about funding the magazine, he said yes. Horizon was born.
Watson insisted that Stephen Spender be brought on as an associate editor, sort of as a back-up for Cyril in case he lost interest or in some other way fell short. Watson would be financial backer and de facto art editor. Cyril remained as head of Horizon until it folded in 1950.
Jean spent some time in California and then settled in New York. She fell in with the Ex-Pat group that centered around Peggy Guggenheim and became Peggy's friend. She wrote some reviews for The Nation. (Did she write a good review of a Pollock before Clem ever did? Why don't I know that? Well, I'd need more support to consider it vetted.) She met Clem Greenberg who had been dating her sister. (How that came about has yet to be revealed to me.) She began dating Clem, (even after she learned that he had smacked her sister Annie in the face), and it developed into a love affair which lasted about two years, until Clem got drafted. The separation from her, combined with the poor ambiance of the Army threw Clem into what must have been a complete nervous breakdown, though one from which he recovered quickly when discharged. Jean however was no longer available, having by then fallen in love with Lawrence Vail, all the while she was still on chummy terms with his ex-wife Peggy.
After the War Jean and Vail married and went back to Paris. Jean died of a stroke in Paris in 1950. Vail never remarried and died in 1968. Even stranger is how Jean lived with Peggy in NYC in 1943 while she was Laurence’s lover. Jean’s sister Anne would go on to marry Nathan "Bill" Davis, a former lover of Peggy and fellow early collector with Guggenheim of Jackson Pollock’s work.
*Concerning the friends of influence list, and for those who enjoy footnotes: [All from Wikipedia]........
*Cecil Beaton and George Orwell he had known since childhood, at St. Cyprian's. .....Bobby Boothby he knew from Eton. .....
*Boothby went from stockbroker to member of Parliament in 1924, where he represented the county of Aberdeen and Kincardine East, in the Scottish Highlands, and was there till 1958.....
.....He was Parliamentary Private Secretary to Chancellor of the Exchequer Winston Churchill from 1926 to 1929.....From 1930 he began a long affair with Lady Dorothy Macmillan, wife of the Conservative politician Harold Macmillan, and rumored to be the father of their youngest daughter, Sarah. He was married twice. His first wife (married 1935) was Diana Cavendish, daughter of
Lord Richard Cavendish, and Lady Dorothy's first cousin; he married her after concluding
his relationship with the married Lady Dorothy to be "on the wane". ....Then, swiftly realizing the marriage had been a mistake, (it went on to be a
source of long-lasting guilt for him), it was dissolved in 1937. His second wife (married 1967) was Wanda Sanna, a Sardinian woman 33
years his junior. His second cousin, writer and broadcaster Sir Ludovic Kennedy asserted that Boothby fathered at least three children by the wives of other men, "Two by one woman, one by another."
Throughout his career he held many important positions on many important government committees, was at one time Rector of the University of St. Andrews, Chairman of the Royal Philharmonic, was given many awards and a KBE in 1953.
He was a consistent supporter of homosexual law reform. While there were rumors about his sexuality he denied he was a homosexual. He did though speculate about the possibility of a homosexual relationship in the drowning of his friend Michel Llewelyn Davies, (one of the models for Peter Pan), and another fellow Oxonian Rupert Buxton.
And then there is the following which I'll lift straight form Wikipedia:
In 1963, Boothby began an affair with East End
cat burglar Leslie Holt (d. 1979), a younger man he met at a gambling
club. Holt introduced him to the gangster Ronnie Kray, one of the Kray twins, who allegedly supplied Boothby with young men, and arranged orgies in Cedra Court (the apartment block in Hackney where the Kray twins lived), receiving favors from Boothby in return. When Boothby's underworld associations came to the attention of the Sunday Express, the Conservative supporting newspaper opted not to publish the damaging story. The matter was eventually reported in 1964 in the Labour-supporting Sunday Mirror tabloid, and the parties were subsequently named by the German magazine Stern.
Boothby denied the story and threatened to sue the Mirror. His close friend Tom Drieberg—a senior Labor MP, and also homosexual—also associated with the Krays; hence, neither of the major political parties had an interest in publicity, and the newspaper's owner Cecil King came under pressure from the Labor leadership to drop the matter. The Mirror backed down, sacked its editor, apologized and paid Boothby £40,000 in an out-of-court settlement. Other newspapers became less willing to cover the Krays' criminal activities, which continued for three more years. The police investigation received no support from Scotland Yard while Boothby embarrassed his fellow peers by campaigning on behalf of the Krays in the Lords, until their increasing violence made association impossible. It has been claimed that journalists who investigated Boothby were subjected to legal threats and break-ins, and that much of that suppression was directed by Arnold Goodman. [Whoever he was.]
*Born in 1900 in Yorkshire, Gladwyn Jebb was educated at Sandroyd School, Eton College, and then Magdalen College, Oxford. In 1929 he married Cynthia Noble, daughter of Sir Saxton Noble, 3rd Baronet. Cynthia was granddaughter of Sir Andrew Noble, 1st Baronet and the and the great-granddaughter of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. ( A versatile and audacious 19th century engineer who created the Great Western Railway).
In 1940, he was appointed to the Ministry of Economic Warfare with temporary rank of Assistant Under-Secretary. Later, he was Later, he was appointed Chief Executive Officer of the Special Operations Executive. In February 1942, with a change of Minister of Economic Warfare, Jebb was relieved of this appointment and returned to the Foreign Office. He was appointed Head of the Reconstruction Department and in 1943 was made a Counsellor. In this capacity he attended numerous international conferences, including those held at Tehran, Yalta, Dumbarton Oaks, and Potsdam.
After WWll, Jebb served as Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations in August 1945, being appointed Acting United Nations Secretary-General from October 1945 to February 1946, until the appointment of the first Secretary-General Trygve Lie. Jebb remains the only UN Secretary-General or Acting Secretary-General to come from a permanent member state of the United Nations Security Council.
Returning to London, Jebb served as Deputy to the Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin at the Conference of Foreign Ministers before serving as the Foreign Office's United Nations Adviser (1946-1947). He represented the United Kingdom at the Brussel's Treaty Permanent Commission with personal rank of ambassado
Jebb became the United Kingdom's Ambassador to the United Nations from 1950 to 1954 and to Paris from 1954 to 1960. He was the UK's first permanent UN representative. In the latter role, he was angered that secret negotiations between the British, French and Israelis in advance of the Suez invasion in 1956 took place without his knowledge and, in certain respects, that he was sidelined by Prime Minister Harold Mamillan at the Paris "big power" summit in 1960. His rather "grand" manner caused Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd to coin an epigram; "You're a deb, Sir Gladwyn Jebb".
When asked in the early 1960s why he had joined the Liberal Party, he replied that the Liberals were a party without a general and that he was a general without a party. Like many Liberals, he passionately believed that education was the key to social reform.
*Violet Trefusis (nee Keppel; 6 June 1894 – 29
February 1972) was an English socialite and author. Born Violet Keppel, she was the daughter of Alice Keppel, and her husband,
the Hon. George Keppel, a son of the 7th Earl of Albemarle. (But members
of the Keppel family thought her biological father was William Beckett,
subsequently 2nd Baron Grimthorpe, a banker and MP for Whitby.) \ Violet lived her early youth in London, where the Keppel family had a
house in Portman Square. When she was four years old, her mother became
the favorite mistress of Albert Edward ("Bertie") the Prince of Wales,
who succeeded to the throne as King Edward VII on 22 January 1901. Bertie paid visits to the Keppel household in the afternoon around tea-time on a
regular basis until the end of his life in 1910. George Keppel, who was
aware of the affair, conveniently made himself scarce.
Violet is chiefly remembered for her lengthy affair with the writer Vita Sackville-West, which the two women continued after their respective marriages. The affair was featured in novels by both parties; in Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography, and in many letters and memoirs of the period, roughly 1912–1922. She may have been the inspiration for aspects of the character Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, and of Muriel in Harold Acton's The Soul's Gymnasium. Trefusis herself wrote novels and non-fiction works, both in English and in French, with varying success. She had one sibling, born in 1900, Sonia Rosemary. Sonia is the maternal grandmother of Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and Violet was her great-aunt.
Sackville-West's son Nigel Nicolson wrote the non-fiction Portrait of a Marriage, based on material from his mother's letters, and adding extensive "clarifications", including some of his father's point of view. Such works explored other aspects of the affair. Aspects of Trefusis' character also featured in other novels, including Lady Montdore in Nancy Mitford's Love in a Cold Climate, and Muriel in Harold Acton's The Soul's Gymnasium.
Diana Souhami's Mrs Keppel and her Daughter (1997) provides an overview of the affair and of the main actors in the drama. When Violet was 10, she met Vita (who was two years older) for the first time. After that, they attended the same school for several years and soon recognised a bond between them. When Violet was 14, she confessed her love to Vita and gave her a ring. In 1910, after the death of Edward VII, Mrs Keppel made her family observe a "discretion" leave of about two years before re-establishing themselves in British society. When they returned to London, the Keppels moved to a house in Grosvenor Street. At that time, Violet learned that Vita was soon to be engaged to Harold Nicolson and was involved in an affair with Rosamund Grosvenor. Violet made it clear that she still loved Vita, but became engaged to make Vita jealous. This did not stop Vita from marrying Harold (in October 1913), nor did he curtail his own homosexual adventures after marriage.
The climax came when Harold told Vita that Violet had been unfaithful to her (with Denys). Violet tried to explain, and assured Vita of her innocence. Vita was much too angry and upset to listen, and fled saying she couldn't bear to see Violet for at least two months. Six weeks later Vita returned to France to meet Violet. Mrs Keppel desperately tried to keep the scandal away from London, where Violet's sister, Sonia, was about to be married (to Roland Cubitt). Violet spent much of 1920 abroad, clinging desperately to Vita via continuous letters. In January 1921, Vita and Violet made a final journey to France, where they spent six weeks together. At this time, Harold threatened to break off the marriage if Vita continued her escapades. When Vita returned to England in March, it was practically the end of the affair. Violet was sent to Italy; and, from there she wrote her last desperate letters to their mutual friend Pat Dansey, having been forbidden from writing directly to Vita. At the end of the year, Violet had to face the facts and start to build her life from scratch.
The two former lovers met again in 1940, after the progress of the Second World War forced Trefusis to return to Britain. The women continued to keep in touch and send each other affectionate letters.
In 1924, Violet's mother bought L'Ombrellino, a large villa overlooking Florence, where Galileo Galilei had once lived. When her parents' died in 1947, Violet became, till the end of her life, the chatelaine of L'Ombrellino. After the death of her husband in 1929, Trefusis published several novels, some in English, some in French, that she had written in her medieval "Tour" in Saint-Loup-de-Naud, Seine-et-Marne, France – a gift from Winnaretta.
