Inez Holden: A Memoir, by Anthony Powell

From London Magazine, Oct/Nov 1974, Vol. 14 No. 4, a remembrance of Inez Holden, author of There’s No Story There, reviewed here in August:

Inez Holden died on 30 May this year. She had been unwell for some little time, but her death was unexpectedly sudden. I never had what might be called a day-to-day friendship with her, but, on and off, we knew each other for a long time. In spite of that, if asked conversationally what she was like, I could not attempt to do so by saying: “She was a little like so-and-so.” Inez was not really at all like any other woman I have ever met. One side of her always contradicted the other. In a strange way it was herself, rather than her books, that marked her out. Her novels, like her talk, full of wit and original ideas, never quite came off. They lacked construction. She was author of Sweet Charlatan, Born Old: Died Young, To the Boating, The Adults, and some others. She also wrote short stories, and documentary pieces. Some of the stories were transposed into C. K. Ogden’s Basic English in a volume called Death in High Society [online at Ogden’s Basic English].

I think it must have been as far back as 1927 that Evelyn Waugh, after a visit to Duckworth’s (the publishing firm where I then worked), suggested we should lunch together at The Gargoyle, a club he had recently joined. I had never been there. It had not been going for more than a year or two, and was in principle a night-club, though one of a very respectable order; frequented to some extent by the intelligentsia, even if Constant Lambert complained that the dance-floor on Saturday nights was crowded with “the two hundred nastiest people in Chiswick.” Waugh and I came on Inez Holden on the way there, or, more probably, found her already lingering at The Gargoyle. I had heard Waugh speak of her before, without myself forming a very clear picture. A clear picture, as I have said, was not at all easy to form. Even now I feel some diffidence in presenting this scrap of reminiscence, because there is so much about Inez that I have never known.

The three of us lunched together under the large picture by Matisse that hung in the dining-room, and gave the club a certain distinction. I think almost certainly Waugh, with his usual generosity, paid for Inez’s luncheon, although this was far from one of his affluent periods. Afterwards I was put up for the club, of which I remained a member for some years. It would have been logical for Waugh to put me up, Inez to second me, but I have an idea the process was vice versa. If so, I can find no reason for this, especially as she had never before set eyes on me. At that time Inez was very pretty. Those who knew her only after some glandular condition had sadly altered her appearance could not guess her earlier “consumptive charm.” (to quote Constant Lambert again), a then fashionable type of beauty, which — as it turned out quite unjustifiably since her health was not failing — led to Inez being known in some circles (the Sitwells and Willie Walton, I suspect) as “Gallopers.”

With regard to solidly ascertainable fact, books of reference show Beatrice Inez Lisett Holden as born 21 November 1903 (a fairly typical Scorpio, it might be judged) into the younger branch of a landowning Derbyshire family. Her father had been for a few years in the Indian cavalry; her mother (nee Paget) was reputed to have had some fame as an Edwardian beauty. Inez’s own references to her family background consistently suggested early unhappiness; domestic shadows fell from wholesale neglect, and regrettable behaviour on the part of both parents. Her political opinions reflected a sharp reaction (shown even in the early novels) against the hardness and selfishness of Edwardian smart life. At the same time, Inez herself never lost all trace of this Edwardian stigmata, revealed not so much in her outward appearance (which could be dishevelled), as in the way she regarded certain things….

Her first novel, Sweet Charlatan, was published by Duckworth’s. Inez was not introduced there by myself — nor, I think, Waugh — in fact, I felt professional reservations about the book’s chances…. Inez turned the heat on Thomas Balston, the moving spirit in Duckworth’s, and he accepted Sweet Charlatan, not a very good novel, for publication. Balston, a bachelor in his late forties, authority on Staffordshire figures and the paintings of John Martin, was not at all used to young ladies of the Inez type. He fell. I don’t think it would be going to far to say that for a short time she made hay of him.

During the immediate years before World War II, Inez had a flat in Albany Street, just around the corner from where my wife and I lived. We used to see a certain amount of her. This was the period of her practical interest in politics, stimulated probably in the first instance by the Spanish Civil War. At this time she would talk a lot about Peter Spencer (by then Viscount Churchill; like Evan Tredegar twice married in face of contrary tastes, but, in contrast, an impoverished viscount, rather than a rich one), and I remember Inez describing a Trafalgar Square meeting, where, she and Lord Churchill both on the rostrum, Left Wing sympathizers threw half-a-crowns on to the platform. “They’d have been quite easy to keep,” Inez said.

… During the war, she worked in a factory (operating the house-cinema, I believe), and I don’t think it was until the war that she became friends with George Orwell…. It was also during the war that Inez became friends with H. G. Wells. Wells lent her the garage flat in the mews at the end of the garden of his Regent’s Park house. There Inez lived for eighteen months. When visiting her Orwell me Wells, of whose writings he was a great admirer. Indeed my own rather reluctant readings of several Wells novels are entirely owed to Orwell pressure. For some reason, in spite of this liking for his books, Orwell irritated the writer himself; provoking Wells’s immortal comment, already on record: “Read my early works, you shit.”

After the war Inez lived for years in a flat in George Street, off Baker Street…. A compulsive newspaper reader and TV viewer, she would become obsessed by subjects the papers were running — say, sex-change or computer dating — and talk of these without cease throughout a whole luncheon or dinner…. Later Inez left George Street, moved to Lower Belgrave Street, where she would sometimes be seen about in the neighbourhood dressed in stray adjuncts of military uniform. One recalls that Miss Virginia Jenkinson was reported in the Double Daily Despatch gossip column as having a “penchant for wearing fancy dress in the day-time.” I last heard from Inez a couple of years ago. She wrote: “My own memory, I think, is phenomenal — really like the horse Clever Hans. Do you know about him? He could answer almost any question but he did have to tap it out with his hoof.”