The Paget sisters: ‘Mine eyes dazzle. She died young.’

The Dazzling Paget Sisters (McNally Editions, 285p, $19) by Celia’s daughter Ariane Bankes is an engaging book with many good photos about the stunning, delightful and intelligent identical twins, Mamaine and Celia, born in 1916.  “Their correspondence was the backbone of their lives”—and of this book.  Their mother died a week after they were born.  They were orphaned at twelve and brought up in Suffolk by a rich and eccentric uncle, a kindly aunt and two girl cousins close to their age.

Taught to read at home, the Paget sisters endured several disastrously cruel boarding schools, then a finishing school in Lausanne where they perfected their French.  Their musical talent and interest in birdsong were closely connected.

Many men—bright and dull, attractive and not, promising and hopeless—found the frail darlings irresistible and proposed marriage or, at least, an affair.  Mamaine lamented,  “it is a dog’s life having people wanting to marry one, unkind as it sounds to say so.”  First off the sexual diving board, Mamaine had an affair with her deepest love, the handsome, flamboyant but unreliable “arch-bohemian” Dick Wyndham.  He’d been a patron and pupil of Wyndham Lewis, who did a fine pencil and watercolour  portrait of him in 1922 and then satirised him in The Apes of God.  Wyndham introduced the sisters to their natural habitat, the literary, musical and artistic worlds.

Mamaine met the Hungarian author Arthur Koestler at a party given by Cyril Connolly, then editor of Horizon, in January 1944.  Born in Budapest to an affluent Jewish family, Koestler moved with them to Vienna when he was nine.  He became a Zionist, joined a kibbutz in Palestine  and became the Middle East correspondent for the powerful Ullstein Press in Berlin.  An ardent communist, he traveled extensively in Russia, but did not report the Ukrainian famine or the early political show trials.  Captured when reporting the Civil War in Spain, he spent three months in solitary confinement and heard the howls as prisoners were dragged to their executions.

Articulate, with a strong Hungarian accent, “opinionated, intense and attractive”, Koestler soon seduced Mamaine, and took her to live in a remote and unhealthy cottage in north Wales.  He said he never wanted to have children, and she put up with his unreasonable demands, tempestuous moods, profound depressions and heavy drinking.

He confessed that “for her sake she should leave him, which she refused to do.”  She lamented, “I do sometimes wonder if I live with K because I want to, or because I’m too cowardly to leave him—which I certainly am, owing to my terror of living alone. . . . I realise more than ever that I only feel free and happy when I’m not with K.”  But they married, after six years together, in April 1950.  Koestler got very drunk that night and when she tried to stop him drove off without her.  She had to sleep at the house of Stephen Spender, who said, “I’ve always wanted to spend the night with you; just too bad it had to be your wedding night.”

In 1945 Mamaine had met the brilliant American writer Edmund Wilson, just divorced from Mary McCarthy. He wrote, “I fell terribly in love in London with a young English girl—and one of the brightest I have ever known and—need I say?—rather neurotic.”  He wrote eight pages about her in Europe Without Baedeker (1947).  Bankes notes, “the strain of rejecting Wilson’s unflagging courtship in favour of the absent and unpredictable Koestler took a toll on Mamaine’s health.”

A more serious rival appeared in 1946 when Mamaine first met Albert Camus, whose wife Francine was struggling with depression.  They took a romantic trip to Provence, a brief interlude of happiness, and she called him “perfect & I can find no faults or shortcomings in him at all. . . . He really is the nicest man on earth.”  Camus fell deeply in love with Mamaine, who was “nearly off my head with longing to see Camus.  As for Koestler he is really so sweet and affectionate and funny, I do adore him” when he wanted to win her back.

But Camus was married, with twins, and the brutal Koestler needed her more.  But Koestler was also sleeping with his secretary and future wife, Cynthia Jeffries, with whom he would later commit suicide in 1983.  Mamaine and Koestler finally separated the year after their marriage.  Bankes concludes, “she could take no more of living with Arthur’s argumentativeness, his drinking, his unpredictability, his self-hatred, guilt and wild mood swings, which he always took out on her.”

Celia Paget, meanwhile, had a short-lived marriage to the Irish screenwriter Patrick Kirwan, who was 17 years older and a pub-addicted alcoholic.  Sacheverell Sitwell, Celia’s unrepentant would-be seducer, declared, “as for ‘trying to get at you,’ I should be very ashamed of myself if I did not.”

George Orwell, sexually excited by embracing Celia when she sat on his lap in a crowded taxi, said “the passion went through him like an electric shock.”  Asked what quality he most desired, Orwell replied, “I should like to be irresistible to women,” exactly as the twins were to men.  Blunt and unromantic, Orwell cut to the chase and told Celia, “If you want to marry me or sleep with me, do, if you don’t, don’t.”

Koestler observed that Orwell’s “intellectual honesty made him appear almost inhuman at times.”  Celia recalled that “Koestler practically went down on his knees and implored me to marry George, because he simply loved George, and he would have loved to have had George as a brother-in-law.”  Orwell was an ascetic, Koestler a hedonist.  Both became wealthy but lived a remote, Spartan and self-punishing life: Orwell on the Scottish island of Jura; Koestler and Mamaine in Wales, and next to unhealthy rivers in France and Pennsylvania.  Celia told her, “you happen to be married to a maniac who will insist on choosing the dampest places in the world to live in.”

When Celia visited Orwell, dying of tuberculosis in University College Hospital, he told her that he planned to go from London to Switzerland.  She optimistically said, “they must think you are going to get better.” More realistically, Orwell replied, “Either that, or they don’t want a corpse on their hands.”  If he’d been able to make it to Switzerland, he might have lived longer and enjoyed his late fame and wealth.  Celia and Mamaine both had chronic asthma.  Celia was frequently in and out of hospitals and seemed more of an invalid than her twin.  Yet Mamaine died, like Orwell, in University College Hospital, aged 37 in January 1954, after an increasingly severe series of asthmatic attacks.  Celia lived to 86.

Celia had told Orwell she had fallen in love with the Oxford philosopher A. J. “Freddie” Ayer.  But she finally ended her affair with Ayer — like Koestler, a notorious seducer — and told her twin that “Freddie was now expunged from her heart.”  Ayer was succeeded by the prominent QC Jeremy Hutchinson, then in a semi-detached marriage to the actress Peggy Ashcroft.  When he refused to leave his wife, Celia made the final break from him.

Both twins had husbands named Arthur.  Arthur Goodman, confined in Changi prison in Singapore for five years, from the fall of that fortress in 1941 until the end of the war, had been “bullied, beaten up and nearly starved to death.”  Bankes’ explanation of why he returned to postwar Japan as a diplomat is unconvincing.  She claims it would bury “his memories of imprisonment . . . reconcile himself to the horrors of his wartime experience and to the essential humanity of the Japanese.”  His self-tormenting return to Japan was more likely to constantly revive rather than to bury the agonizing memories, to tear off the scabs of old wounds instead of letting them heal and to recall the cruelty rather than the humanity of his torturers.

Celia married Arthur Goodman in April 1954, when she was 37.  She assumed  responsibility for his late wife’s son (and Polish maid) as well as for Goodman’s six-year-old daughter. He felt that Celia’s delicate health could not stand the climate when he was sent back to Asia, gave up his diplomatic career and unsuccessfully tried to be a farmer in Lincolnshire.  Koestler, by contrast, ignored Mamaine’s asthma and lived in the isolated, damp and miasmic places that suited him, but proved fatal to her.

More could be said about two men in this book.  The American diplomat Robert Joyce, whom Mamaine met in 1948 in Trieste (the city of James Joyce and Italo Svevo), had been Hemingway’s friend in Cuba during World War II.  Orwell called Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman who’d refused to publish his anti-communist reports from Spain, “too dishonest to be outright ‘crypto’ or fellow-traveller, but reliably pro-Russian on all major issues.”

Though Bankes has been a professional editor, many errors appear in this book.  The correct words are: Hyères, unsympathische, Veneziano, Guidotti, Faerie Queene, Reuel Wilson, and, worst of all, Meyers.  Susan Watson (not Watts); Kitzbühel, with umlaut, is in the Austrian (not Bavarian) Alps.

Bankes doesn’t describe the twins’ Presentation at the Court of King George V in March 1935, nor answer two crucial questions: How could you tell the twins apart?  How were their personalities different?  It seems that Mamaine, “highly strung and often neurotic,” was more sexually adventurous and self-sacrificial.   The older-by-minutes Celia was more cautious and emotionally stable.  Mamaine never had the children she wanted.  Celia had a late happy marriage and two children.

Bankes states, “The twins may have played walk-on parts in the biographies of others, but here I hope to give them back their starring roles.”  But they were actually supporting in both senses: they played minor parts in the lives of others and provided valuable emotional support.  Several great authors—Koestler, Edmund Wilson, Camus and Orwell—fell in love with them and proposed marriage.  But the dazzling sisters were not writers, painters or composers, and did nothing to earn a “starring role”.

I’ve written biographies of two of the writers who were wildly in love with and proposed marriage to the twins: Edmund Wilson with Mamaine and Orwell with Celia.  I first interviewed Celia—small and delicate, with blue eyes and fine features—about Edmund Wilson in Cambridge, England, on July 7, 1994, and received three letters from her.  I interviewed her about Orwell in Cambridge on November 24, 1998, and had four letters and a photo.  Celia wrote to me on October 14, 1998: “how I laughed at the imitation you and your wife gave of a lunch with Edmund Wilson’s daughter Rosalind,” who had loudly screeched an obscene story in a respectable upstate New York restaurant.  On January 7,1999 she added, “I enjoyed the day you and Valerie were here.  I enjoyed swapping notes with you on all sorts of things.  For one thing, you have come across quite a few people I’m interested in.”  On October 27, 2000 she concluded, “Your descriptions of Orwell’s houses at Wallington and on Jura bring out their true horror in a way I was unaware of before.”

Author’s Note: I knew eleven of the people mentioned in this book, which gave me greater insight: Celia Goodman, David Astor, Isaiah Berlin, Richard Blair, Robert Conquest, Anne Popham, Peter Quennell,  Michael Scammell, Sacheverell Sitwell, Stephen Spender and Natasha Spender.

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