Book Review: ‘The Dazzling Paget Sisters,’ by Ariane Bankes

THE DAZZLING PAGET SISTERS: The English Twins Who Captivated Literary Europe, by Ariane Bankes

Move over, Véra. See ya, Zelda. Make way for Celia and Mamaine.

The dazzling Paget sisters, as they’ve been rebranded by the U.S. edition of a book published in the United Kingdom as “The Quality of Love,” were identical twins, that category of perpetual aesthetic and scientific fascination.

Born in 1916, orphaned at 12 and educated unconventionally, they grew up to be vivid but fragile poppies among tall waving wheat stalks of midcentury intellectualism: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Wilson, André Malraux, Benjamin Britten, etc.

Though the sisters did not have public bylines, they wrote prolifically and vividly in private. Celia edited a selection of Mamaine’s letters to Koestler, the Austro-Hungarian polymath who was her longtime and somewhat bitter sweetheart, which was published in 1985.

(True, when the general onslaught of correspondence proved overwhelming, Mamaine complained to Celia: “It is a stinking bore.”)

Forty years later, Celia’s daughter, Ariane Bankes, having inherited a “capacious and sooty black” tin trunk stuffed with envelopes and folders, has produced an enchanting double-helix biography of her mother and aunt.

Without undermining the scholarly significance and rigor of “The Dazzling Paget Sisters,” let me note that this relatively slender book contains enough mad capers, heaving proposals and dramatic death throes to be a veritable Harlequin romance for the literary set, with a dash of Sweet Valley High. (“Even Sartre was hoodwinked by Celia pretending to be Mamaine on a later trip to Paris.”)

From the beginning, these twins seemed to toggle with particular agility between the planes of Trivial and Tragic that Koestler theorized govern human existence. Their mother, Georgina, suffered complications giving birth and perished a week afterward. Their early childhood in rural Suffolk was idyllic — books, birdsong, bulrushes — but socially isolated. When they were 7, their doting father, Eric, whom they called Mr. Sardine, was diagnosed with an incurable disease of the nervous system.

They learned of his death in boarding school, and were subsequently entrusted to the care of a rich but stingy and eccentric uncle: “a conservative of the deepest dye” who believed in astrology and reincarnation, and his French wife, Germaine, nicknamed Ging-Ging and enamored of enormous garden parties.

Chronic asthma led Celia and Mamaine to finishing school, and a dawning cosmopolitanism, in the Swiss Alps. They loved music and languages and hoped to attend university (one of their final joint undertakings was the study of ancient Greek) but instead, cursed with good looks, were pressed to come out for two seasons as debutantes in taffeta gowns. There they met a fellow society skeptic, Jessica Mitford, as well as Dick Wyndham, a 20-years-older dashing character at the center of the Bright Young People who fell madly in love with Mamaine.

The press also fell madly in love with the Pagets. A weekly called The Sketch featured the “‘twinnies’ and their twin apartments.” They modeled, traveled, practiced nursing in the same ward during the Blitz (figuring they’d rather be killed together) and were, long before Facebook, highly “friendable,” as Celia put it. She would work for a series of journals whose titles rang with the ideological excitement of the era: Horizon, Occident, Polemic.

Mamaine, meanwhile, became the devoted amanuensis, boon companion and eventually wife to Koestler, who called her Mermaid, refused her children and would have periodic sulks about her indifferent housekeeping as well as the roiling state of the world and politics, adroitly glossed here. The couple were among the first visitors to the new state of Israel, where she warded off robbers by shouting “Thieves in the Night,” the title of his Zionist novel, at them in Hebrew.

Wilson, the portly critic and Mary McCarthy’s soon-to-be ex, was smitten with her as well — “unfortunately it is a bad book so my immortality is not assured,” she wrote of his “Europe Without Baedaker.” And after Koestler threw a piece of bread at her at the Scheherazade, a Paris nightclub, resulting in a black eye, she swooned for Camus.

Their stolen week exploring the Provençal landscape is travelogue of a lost Eden, illustrated with hitherto unpublished snapshots from the trunk. “She warned that he would forget her. ‘Of course, one forgets everything,’” Camus replied. (Nothing like an absurdist French lover!) ”He would simply not want to live in a world in which he had forgotten her.”

As for Celia, after a brief first marriage, she was courted by Orwell, who shortly before he published “1984” and succumbed to tuberculosis would send her a list of crypto-communists and “fellow travelers,” people he believed sympathetic to Stalinism.

Filled with foreboding about “the graveyards of individual freedoms,” “The Dazzling Paget Sisters” nonetheless does plenty of whistling past those graveyards. It’s lacy and necessary filigree between the sober straight lines of history.

THE DAZZLING PAGET SISTERS: The English Twins Who Captivated Literary Europe | By Ariane Bankes | McNally Editions | 285 pp. | Paperback, $19