'You must explain to me why Cyril wants Barbara,' Evelyn Waugh wrote to Ann Fleming in September 1955, a year after Barbara Skelton's marriage to Cyril Connolly had formally ended. 'It's not as though she were rich or a good housekeeper or the mother of his children.' The following year Edmund Wilson asked Connolly, now two years into his divorce, why he didn't get someone else. 'I'm still on the flypaper,' Connolly replied. 'I've got most of my legs loose, but I haven't yet quite got off.' A few months later Skelton married her next husband, George Weidenfeld. Connolly took to his bed, where his ex-wife, according to Wilson, sometimes brought him a bowl of soup.

LRB 29 October 1987 | PDF Download