The Vice of Kings. Jasun Horsley

      “It is a tragic paradox that the very qualities that lead to a man's extraordinary capacity for success are also those most likely to destroy him.”

      —Sebastian Horsley, private correspondence with the author

      My brother's life-path combined worldly success with self-destruction and showed that the two were inseparable for him. When I first quoted the above line in Seen and Not Seen (a line my brother inscribed to me, though he probably stole it from somewhere), I understood it differently. I understood it to mean that the unconscious forces within a person's soul that drive them to create can also drive them to self-destruct. I am fairly sure that was how my brother meant it. Yet he chose the word “success,” not creativity or genius, and success has a distinctly worldly flavor to it. The way I read that quote now (at the end of the investigation you are about to read, if you do), is that the acts a man must commit in order to succeed, and the forces he must align himself with, are also those most likely to destroy him. This has nothing to do with creative self-expression, and everything to do with the will to power.

      The tragic paradox of the artist is that the desire for worldly status is completely at odds with the deeper need of the soul to express what is within it to express. Yet both my brother and I were raised with the notion that worldly success was the final measure of how true or valuable one's expression (one's soul) was. To become a cultural leader was bred into us as the supreme social and personal goal, and as something we were entitled to by birthright. Despite Alec's Quakerism, which he only adopted later on and which my father probably rejected as hypocrisy, we had no religion in our family. My father's highest regard, like his father's, was for the intelligentsia. He made fun of my brother (a dyslexic) for being stupid, thereby delivering an axe blow to my brother's soul from which he never recovered. He gave us money in place of love, a value-set he inherited from his father, who once said, “To show you how much my father loved me, he left all his money to my brother.” (Alec had a lifelong rivalry with his older brother—just as I did.) We were all given snakes in place of fish.

      My brother was a lousy Fabian. He tore off the sheep clothes and openly embodied the wolf. He didn't want to please but to offend—to please by offending. My grandfather posed as the soul of virtue and community values but behind the scenes he was a ruthless businessman and something much more than that (as I think this work will show). Sebastian brought the hidden, criminal aspect of our family heirloom to the fore. He strove to take moral turpitude as far as it could be taken, “to turn decadence into a virtue [and] make the soul monstrous” (2007, p. 291). As I realized while writing Seen and Not Seen, for all his proud defiance of conventional morality and social conscience, there were almost certainly acts which my brother was involved in that he couldn't talk about, not only because of legal consequences but also for fear of reprisals from those involved. So while our father and grandfather hid their secret lives behind a cloak of virtue, my brother hid his behind a cloak of vice. In many ways, it is an even better disguise.

      Were there things my brother, father, and grandfather were sworn not to tell? If so, what were they? What follows is an attempt to answer this maddening question, using a combination of investigation, deduction, and imagination—all of which are equally required when dealing with generational secrets.

      My brother described himself as a “failed suicide” and “a futile blast of color in a colorless world” (2007, p. 323). Privately, he told me that he considered suicide the only honorable path for a nihilist, implying that at a certain point he planned to take his own life in order to cheat death, or God, of that pleasure. More poetically, he wrote in Dandy that the most important thing about facing the firing squad was to give the order oneself. Much of my brother's self-mythologizing was effective. It was believed, even, perhaps especially, by the people he kept close to him (which did not include his family). It was then picked up by the mainstream media, and today his death is seen by many as less tragic than heroic, as proof of a life lived on its own terms. Live by the needle, die by the needle. Such a view conveniently ignores—banishes—the question of what caused the suicidal addiction to begin with.

      My brother and I were born and raised in an environment that glamorized vice and normalized corruption—in which corruption disguised itself as virtue. How else was he to feel safe in such an environment except by matching it, rejecting all virtue as a lie, and becoming as corrupt—openly so—as the world around him?

      Children imitate not what they are told but what they are shown. Thinking of everyone who grew up during this period in Britain, watching Jimmy Savile cracking jokes about his crimes on national TV, going to schools and care homes run by sexual predators, unable to talk about it or even consciously acknowledge it, the question arises, what sort of long-term effect does this have on generations of children? My brother's case may just be one, particularly extreme case among legion.

      There's no hard evidence my brother was sexually abused as a child. But then, there almost never is. Often the incident or incidents that traumatize a person's psyche are pushed into unconsciousness, shrouded by a protective veil of amnesia; and the deeper the trauma, the darker the veil. But the trauma shows through anyway: it shows through as behaviors. There is very little about my brother's public life, his persona, and his interest-obsessions, that doesn't point to a hidden history of abuse. Add to that the countless pieces of circumstantial evidence that our family circle overlapped, at multiple points—if it wasn't entirely at one with—the circles of systematized sexual abuse currently coming to light in the UK, and what does that leave?

      Glamorized vice. If you can't beat them, join them.