Modernisms

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Anthony Powell, Constant Lambert, D.J. Taylor, E.M. Forster, Edith Sitwell, Ford Madox Hueffer, H.G. Wells, Henry James, John Middleton Murry, Joseph Conrad, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Muriel Jaeger, Peter Quennell, Sarah Cole, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, William Walton

When I read Lost Girls by D.J. Taylor last autumn, I was disappointed. It seemed to me that the book only really came alive when Taylor was discussing the London literary scene during the 1940s, and the four young women who were the titular subject of the book were at best only peripherally involved in that scene. So I decided to try a book that seemed to more directly address his interests. Which is how his 2016 literary history, The Prose Factory, appeared on my Christmas list (very many thanks, Maureen).

At the moment I am only into the second chapter, but already it is obvious that this is a subject he is much more interested in writing about. The book is a literary history of Britain from 1918 until, more or less, the present, and it is as general and has the sort of blinkers as one might expect. A cursory glance, for instance, suggests that H.G. Wells is the only science fiction writer to appear in the index; which is fine with me, I wasn’t really expecting anything else. As a broad account of literary movements it is providing exactly the sort of historical context I was hoping for, and at times it can be quite revealing.

When you look at literary history from a science fiction perspective, for instance, modernism tends to come across as a monolithic force, an instant literary establishment that, as the result of a quarrel between Henry James and H.G. Wells, conspired to exclude Wells and, in his wake, science fiction as a whole, from serious academic consideration. It wasn’t exactly like that. Reading Taylor’s chapter on modernism in the 1920s I wasn’t surprised to find that it was quite a fragmented movement, but I was surprised to learn how tribal it was.

The father of literary modernism, as I suppose we might put it, was Henry James, who is barely mentioned in Taylor’s book primarily because he had died in 1916. He brought a number of his Romney Marsh friends and neighbours, such as Joseph Conrad and Ford Maddox Ford, into the modernist camp on his coat tails, though it has to be said that at the time Conrad and Ford were more readily seen among the Georgians, the conservative, traditionalist literary movement that began with the end of the Edwardian era and fizzled out during the First World War.

It was after the war that modernism really got going, often lauded within the pages of the plethora of small magazines that were published throughout those years. These are magazines with famous names – Criterion, The Athenaeum – but they were still decidedly small. Even the best of them were lucky to have a circulation of 1,000, and those subscribers were fickle, if they grew weary of John Middleton Murry’s jeremiads in The Athenaeum, they would switch to T.S. Eliot’s austere pronouncements in Criterion. And though Taylor doesn’t say so, I get the distinct impression that this readership primarily consisted of academics in Oxford and Cambridge, and would-be writers in London plodding from the offices of one small magazine to the next in the hope of getting published. Despite this, the magazines were influential, at least in terms of how later academics look back on the modernists.

Middleton Murry was the cheerleader for one tribe of modernists, endorsing a number of the newer writers. But he seems to have been at war with everyone, and fairly soon lost his influence. Another tribe centred on the Sitwells, who were early advocates of the work of Eliot. Their circle included the composers William Walton and Constant Lambert, and they brought into their branch of modernism something of the polyrhythms and improvisation of jazz, the other great artistic movement of the decade but one that was not otherwise widely taken up by modernists. But the Sitwells were self-obsessed, idiosyncratic, and argumentative. Edith Sitwell in particular seems to have delighted in her feuds. There is one delightful vignette in Taylor’s book in which someone came upon Edith Sitwell and Virginia Woolf sitting side by side on a settee during one of their periodic truces, and I got a vivid impression of two tight-lipped women each preparing to spit venom at the other. Woolf, and Bloomsbury, introduces another tribe, one that encompassed the artistic as much as the literary, and whose publishing house, the Hogarth Press, brought out books by writers like E.M.Forster, Peter Quennell, and Muriel Jaeger, who weren’t all normally classed as modernists. Though the most notable title from the Hogarth Press was probably the first edition of “The Waste Land”, which brings us inevitably to Eliot himself, buttoned-up and puritanical, whose early poems, and especially “The Waste Land”, made him the torchbearer for post-war modernism. He inspired reverence – Taylor tells of a young Anthony Powell gazing in wonder when he chanced to spy Eliot dining alone at a Charlotte Street restaurant – and there were any number of would be writers trying to copy his work (as successfully as such copyists invariably are); but he also inspire mystification and condemnation, especially from critics like J.C. Squire, the last of the Georgians. Though Eliot himself, politically conservative and religiously inclined, probably had more in common with the Georgians than with the new generation of would-be revolutionaries who followed in his wake.

And this, I suspect, barely does justice to the internecine conflicts that characterised the first decade or so of literary modernism in Britain. I mean, where does one fit James Joyce, championed by Eliot but hardly the clubbable type one might find in Bloomsbury or at a Sitwell country home? So when Sarah Cole, in her truly wonderful book, Inventing Tomorrow: H.G. Wells and the Twentieth Century, argues that Wells was a modernist writer all along, the response has to be: of course, but what brand of modernist?

Lost? Girls?

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Anthony Powell, Barbara Skelton, Cyril Connolly, D.J. Taylor, Edmund Wilson, Evelyn Waugh, Feliks Topolski, George Orwell, George Weidenfeld, Ian Lubbock, Janetta Woolley, Joan Leigh Fermor, Lys Connolly, Michael Shelden, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Quennell, Sonia Brownell, Stephen Spender

Back in the 1980s, Michael Shelden wrote Friends of Promise, an account of Cyril Connolly and the circle around him at Horizon, the literary magazine he edited throughout the 1940s. It remains the definitive work on this key aspect of literary London during wartime. That is the book, I think, that D.J. Taylor wanted to write. He had, after all, already written a biography of George Orwell, probably the most significant writer to have been published in Horizon (and, curiously, Shelden would follow up Friends of Promise with a biography of Orwell). Taylor had also written a book on the Bright Young Things of London society during the gilded age of the 1920s, and also The Prose Factory, a survey of literary life in England since 1918. Within such a spectrum of interest, Horizon and Connolly is not just a natural fit, it almost feels like the inevitable next step.

But Shelden had already taken that step, and despite the fact that letters and diaries and other resources have emerged since Shelden’s book was published, it is unlikely that Taylor would really have been in a position to write a startlingly new and different take on the same subject. So he let his gaze wander from the centre to the periphery, in particular to the young women who circled around Connolly, as lovers (or occasionally wives), secretaries, helpmeets, confidants. There were four of them in particular: Lys, Janetta, Sonia and Barbara. Collectively, Taylor calls them the “Lost Girls”, taking the term from Peter Quennell’s autobiography, The Wanton Chase. Taylor doesn’t wholly accept Quennell’s term, but he doesn’t exactly question it either. My own sense, on the other hand, is that they were neither lost nor girls. They were beautiful, ambitious, sexually active young women who found themselves in a particular wartime bohemia, and they took advantage of their circumstances that would have been unquestioned, even unremarked, if they had been men. The women who came before them in the 1920s were the same, as were the women who came after them in the 1960s, but because this was the 1940s they were somehow regarded as courtesans. Men who behaved the same would have been hailed as adventurers. Taylor doesn’t lay out the contrast so starkly, I’m not even sure he is fully aware of it, but it is there buried in the assumptions and subtexts of the book.

It is notable, for instance, that the first view of any of these women in Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature 1939-1951 comes from the male gaze. After Quennell’s description of the lost girls in general, there are four single-sentence quotations, one for each of the women: Edmund Wilson on Barbara, Stephen Spender on Sonia, Evelyn Waugh on Lys, and George Weidenfeld on Janetta. The women are perennial adjuncts to the men, to be seen from outside. The real interest is in the men who are doing things in Horizon, these women are just there to provide a different perspective on the main action.

Sonia Brownell on the left, Lys Connolly on the right

Lys, Janetta, Sonia and Barbara: the men in this book are Connolly, Quennell, Orwell, Waugh, Topolski, and so on, but the women are always addressed by their first names. In a long preamble, Taylor explains this as being because their surnames changed so often. Lys, for example, began life as Lys Dunlap; she married Ian Lubbock but soon thereafter left him to become Cyril Connolly’s mistress, changing her name to Connolly by deed poll when he wouldn’t marry her; after she left Connolly at the end of the decade she eventually married again and became Lys Koch. But she was Lys Lubbock or, by her own choice, Lys Connolly, for the entire period covered by this book. Sonia Brownell was known by that name throughout the 1940s until, right at the end of the decade, she became Sonia Orwell; similarly, Barbara Skelton had that name throughout the decade until, in the closing pages of the book as it were, Lys left Connolly and Barbara became, for a while, Barbara Connolly. Significantly, when she began publishing books in the 1950s she published under the name Barbara Skelton. There must, I think, have been more subtle, less sexually pointed ways, of identifying the various characters throughout the book.

Without exception, by the way, the men in this book are total shits, and the shittiest of them all is Cyril Connolly. At the end of the 1930s he was married to Jean but had left his wife to live with Diana, whom he then left to live with Lys. Lys remained his mistress, housekeeper, secretary, hostess of his innumerable parties, and general dogsbody for nearly ten years, but he would not marry her and spent an inordinate amount of time belittling her in conversation. Yet when she did leave him he spent years stalking her, bombarding her with letters, and insisting that they should get back together, all while having now married Barbara. This, by the way, was serial behaviour: when his marriage to Barbara ended, George Weidenfeld was cited in the divorce; when that marriage ended, Cyril Connolly was cited in the divorce. But it wasn’t just his treatment of women that was execrable. At the centre of this whole menage was the magazine, Horizon, which he had launched in December 1939. Part of the thinking behind this launch seems to have been that as editor he would be in a reserved occupation and thus not liable for any form of war work. The magazine was major literary and artistic centrepiece in mid-century Britain, but Connolly was a rather lazy editor who left much of the work to the women who worked there. Sonia Brownell in particular seems to have been the de facto if unacknowledged editor of the magazine throughout the last years of its life while Connolly used his expenses to fund foreign travel, a hectic social life, and fine food and wine, while occasionally remembering to write back to base and ask, casually, how the magazine was going.

The sex appeal of Cyril Connolly remains a mystery.

Actually, for a book ostensibly about literary London in wartime, we learn very little about Horizon itself. Only a bare handful of contributors are even mentioned, and there is no analysis of what it published or how it shaped the literary landscape for years to come. George Orwell appears because he went on to marry Sonia; Joan Rayner, whose photographs were published in Horizon, is mentioned because she was a sexually active member of that milieu who Connolly fancied before she went on to marry Patrick Leigh Fermor. Yet this neglect of Horizon as a literary artefact jars with the fact that Taylor is a good literary historian. One of the best things about this book, something that does make it well worth reading, is the adept way he uses novels and memoirs of the period to paint a vivid picture of how things were at the time. And there is a fine late section of the book in which Taylor traces the afterlife of the four girls in postwar novels by writers who knew them at the time. Barbara, for instance, is a recurring character in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time sequence.

All told, therefore, it is an interesting and at times revealing book hampered by the way it approaches the four women who are supposedly its central subject matter.