AND ANOTHER THING
Clearing up the mystery of a love affair 40 years ago
PAUL JOHNSON
Just occasionally a document comes to light which throws a brilliant ray of illumi- nation into a dark corner of the past and solves a mystery which has been nagging one for decades. This happened to me the other day when I got a copy of Between Friends, the correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975. I bought it after reading a scathing review by David Pryce-Jones in this journal and expected, like him, to be entertained by the unconscious humour of these two self- important left-wing ladies chewing over the Cold War cud. Instead, I was treated to the touching, indeed tragic, solution to a puzzle which had intrigued me since 1955. The question was: did my old friend John Dav- enport have a spectacular love affair with Mary McCarthy or not?
Perry Worsthorne, who had been taught English by Davenport at Stowe, claimed that the romance was a reality and had gone on 'for years'. The late John Ray- mond, on the other hand, said it was a com- plete fantasy, one of many in which Daven- port indulged. All of us enormously admired Davenport for his wit and erudi- tion. We used to meet every Saturday morning in a dingy King's Road pub called the Commercial (now tailed up and re- named the Chelsea Potter). However early we arrived, Davenport was always ahead of us, seated at a table and 'clearing up', as he put it, 'my correspondence'. Many neat lit- tle envelopes were spread out on the table, addressed in his exquisite hand, and as we arrived he gathered them to himself and put them away, but not before we had had ample opportunity to read who it was he had been writing to: 'The Duke of Welling- ton KG', 'Dylan Thomas Esq', 'HRH Princess Louise of Bourbon-Parma', T.S. Eliot OM' and other names to conjure with. For a time, letters addressed to Mary McCarthy also figured in this collection, and inquiries about her were met with meaningful evasions and sly hints.
John Raymond maintained that Daven- port's entire correspondence was fantasy and all the envelopes scattered on the table had been addressed to impress us and were never sent. Why, he asked, should the McCarthy envelopes be any different? However, Billy Hughes, a rich lawyer who also belonged to our circle, used to insinu- ate darkly that there was more to it than that, and he might have a tale to tell were he not bound by professional confidentiali- ty etc. (a device he often employed when he wished to lay claim to knowledge he proba- bly did not possess). That Davenport, a muscle-bound, almost square, middle-aged man (he had been an all-in wrestler or boxer at one time), with a brick-red face, heavily married and much tortured by debts, drink and lack of productivity, should have enraptured McCarthy, then still good-looking and at the height of her fame, seemed improbable. But we were never quite sure. Asking Mary herself, who popped up in London from time to time, was out of the question: she was liable to be snarky at the best of times.
Now the answer is plain for all to see. She did indeed fall in love with Davenport, having met him in Rome, at the Hotel D'Inglaterra, in May 1956. They had an affair. As both were married, concealment was necessary, and McCarthy went secretly to London later in the summer to resume it, reporting ecstatically to her correspon- dent: 'Dear Hannah, it's been wonderful, more so than I could conceive, abstractly.' But during the winter of 1957, when they were separated by the Atlantic, Davenport had stopped replying to her letters, so when McCarthy returned to London in spring 1957, she took advantage of an airy Daven- port aside: 'I'll give you the number of my cousin, Billy Hughes, in case you find it hard to get hold of me.'
A letter McCarthy wrote to Arendt on 21 May tells the rest of the story. 'I called up the cousin, the lawyer in Belgravia, who said, Yes, he would fix up a rendezvous that afternoon at his flat.' A telegram would be sent, 'the Davenport phone being shut off for lack of payment', and if the telegram got no response, Hughes would send his house- keeper to fetch him. McCarthy arrived at the 'very elegant Belgravia flat' at 5.45, to find `Mr Hughes, a tall dark man in white tie and tails', waiting for her. The house- keeper was sent off in a taxi to fetch Daven- port. In 30 minutes, Hughes said, he had to 'What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?' leave for an official dinner attended by the Duke of Edinburgh, so he must not be late. Meanwhile, they talked about Davenport.
McCarthy's first shock came when Hugh- es corrected her reference to Davenport being his cousin. '"Cousin? Did he tell you that?" And he laughed rather irritably. "I'm not his cousin. I'm no relation to him." ' Then Hughes added, 'I think I'd better tell you that John is a pathological liar.' McCarthy commented, 'Well, Hannah, that's how it all started. His ancestry. All that was lies about him and his "gentle birth"? Hughes told McCarthy that Daven- port's father was 'a drunk who was a writer of song lyrics' and his mother 'an actress who played chars' but that Davenport pre- tended `to be related to everyone in Debrett'. As for his drinking, 'it was much worse than I could possibly imagine'. He spent all his time in pubs getting 'bestially drunk'. Noth- ing could be done for him because of his lying. He also stole — 'books and small objects', such as Hughes's silver ash-trays. 'He stole books from the Observer and sold them, all the reviewers in London knew it.' And, said Hughes darkly, 'he bragged'. He had been boasting about his affair with her. The fortunate thing, said Hughes, was that he was known to be such a liar that in this instance nobody believed him.
By this point, McCarthy related, she was 'almost fainting'. The housekeeper, whom she called Evans but who was in fact named Walsh, arrived back without Davenport. She looked upset, and Hughes commented, 'She's afraid of [Davenport] I think.' Hugh- es added that he was a violent man. His wife had had a breakdown 'trying to bring up his children under these fearful condi- tions'. Instead of trying to help her, 'John goes around London telling people she's mad'. They both left in a taxi, Hughes to his dinner, McCarthy to her hotel.
McCarthy reported to Arendt: 'The truth is, I still care about him, just as much as ever, though perhaps this feeling would not last if I saw him in actuality.This caring, of course, is really hopeless now. Hughes says he is hopeless, and I believe him.' At any rate, the affair came to an abrupt end. Why Billy Hughes disillusioned McCarthy quite so brutally I do not know. He did tend to be jealous of his friends' happiness, though in general he was a good sort. And of course most of what he said was true. It is a sad lit- tle tale. Those involved are dead now. But it is a relief to have the mystery cleared up.
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