Fault Lines. David Pryce-Jones
The earth is slow and sweet, the quick feet of a hare go gladly.
Alan patted himself on the back, “Shelley pales before this slight but distinguished piece. Observe the brilliant technique, the clever internal rhymes.” Or again in August, “My famous book has already begun – some 2,000 words are written – magnificent stuff.” The weather was so hot that month that he bought “a straw hat 70 foot round.” Asking him to begin in the office on the 23rd of the month, Squire put paid to the Oxford episode. Unidentifiable, the famous novel remained one among other false starts but the aspiration endured. Reading War and Peace a few years later, he noted in his diary, “Such is my vanity that I long to tackle an enormous novel myself.” He was capable of analyzing what was holding him back.
Whenever I write about people they are always quite inhuman – far more intelligent than human beings and very eccentric. I don’t know what to do about this. Also I can’t write “hearty” conversation. All my characters speak in a pert, queenly way because that is the language of the people I have always lived among…. I am so shy of squalor and noisy crowds and I hate the poor so much that I am not sure that I could [just set out at random]. Yet I don’t see how otherwise to get in touch with ordinary people. Certainly it is not easy to do it in my usual procession from Ritz to Ritz. How passionately I long to be stupid and a stockbroker.
“Lately,” reads an entry in his diary dated January 1932,
the great thing has been my sailor, Tommy, lately a midshipman on the Devonshire and now on leave. Sailor and I had planned a weekend in Glastonbury (why?) but he had influenza at the last moment…. I lied to my family that I was going to Windsor, took rooms in Laurier’s Hotel and he came. Oh, what furtive pleasure! What laughter! … actually my emotions about the Sailor were piercing: I liked the queer heartiness, the shyness, attempts at intellectuality, violence, childishness.
At the same time he had a vital insight.
The reason no homosexual affair can ever be translated into art is that there is no common ground of homosexual, as of heterosexual, experience. Homosexual affairs are entirely personal; without knowing the actual lover, without being one of them, no translation into art could mean anything.
If there is a solution to this impasse, Alan never found it.
In the course of a lunch many years later still, Mitzi suddenly turned on him, saying that she had never believed that he had written a word of the great novel he was always talking about. It was virtually completed, Alan protested, and he summarized there and then a Kafkaesque plot he had devised around the life of Geoffrey Madan, a brilliant eccentric who had devoted himself to writing aphorisms. I was completely convinced that he could not have improvised so circumstantially on the spur of the moment, but Mitzi was right.
SEVEN
Money! Money! Money!
With weekends in the country and holidays in France,
With promiscuous habits, time to sunbathe and dance,
And even to write books that were hardly worth a glance,
Earning neither reputation nor the publisher’s advance:
Just like a young writer
Between the wars.
WILLIAM PLOMER, “Father and Son: 1939”
THE VILE BODIES of the 1920s were pioneers of a contemporary art of attracting fame by being infamous, acquiring social status by appearing to mock it, altogether transforming unconventionality into convention. Like others in this London set, Alan was sure that he could make his way abusing privilege as much as he liked and never have to pay a price. A slim young man, he had good looks and an appealing manner that made friends and got him invited wherever he wanted. A slightly odd feature was that in an age before orthodentistry both his canine teeth stuck out slightly, adding a touch of vulnerability to his smile. At that stage he had no money, and put a great deal of his natural talents into getting in with the right people.
Homosexuality was Alan’s early passport to social and literary success, and I used to wonder to what extent, if any, it had been formed by his mother’s possessiveness, her wildly over-the-top praise for everything he did, and in contrast his father’s withholding of emotion. At a time when homosexuality was criminalized, Vere and Harry had received enough information from Alan himself to know that the way he was behaving was not a matter of style but part of his self-discovery. Poppets indeed! Their second son, Adrian, Din or Gruffy to his parents and to Alan, was brought up almost as though he were an invalid. Sent to preparatory school and then Eton, he wrote letters home almost daily in an unmistakable spirit of dependency. As an adult he was a friend of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and had been present at parties with boy scouts and RAF servicemen in the beach house at Beaulieu, which led to scandal and prison sentences for Lord Montagu and a friend of his. In the manner of Oscar Wilde, Adrian ran away to France to lie low for a while. Unworldly as Harry and Vere were in some respects, they can hardly have helped drawing obvious conclusions from the conduct of their two sons. It stretches credulity to breaking point to suppose that they never asked themselves whether responsibility for the sexuality of their two sons lay with them or in the genes.
After Evan Morgan in pre-Oxford days, another of Alan’s lovers was Harold Nicolson. According to his biographer James Lees-Milne, Nicolson was only attracted by younger intellectual men of his own class, and he furthermore “believed that homosexuality should be a jolly vice, and not taken too seriously.” Nicolson is quoted saying of Alan, “I like him more than I care to think.” He was the first to put about the word that Alan was the new literary star in London, and a masterpiece, probably in the form of a travel book, could be expected from him. The book should be such, Nicolson suggested, that a suitable title would be “An Exhibitionist in Asia.”
In the south of France in the summer of 1929 Somerset Maugham was next to take him up, inviting him to the Villa Mauresque. On boating trips and parties around the swimming pool there were up to a dozen naked young men. On 24 March 1930 Alan was writing with more introspection than jauntiness: “My atmosphere is lunching with John Banting and Brian [Howard] and Eddy Sackville-West in Charlotte Street, or spending the weekend with Maurice Bowra at Oxford, or staying with Hamish [St. Clair Erskine] at Sussex. Other things I hate … except that I want success, tremendous success and lots of money.” (Then a young Oxford don, Bowra was already well on the way to becoming what might be called the general secretary of the Hominform, collating and spreading gossip to the like-minded.) Alan again:
When I am with Sandy [Baird] or Brian or Eddy I am a quite different person. Instead of being a young, brilliantly promising poet, a sort of solitary yet kind creature, I become a very shy, rather ineffectual eccentric, a person trying to attract attention by wit and by ballet movements, by light colours and lithe motions. I become rather old, rather silly and inarticulate, a tangle of inferiority. That kind of collapse is only mitigated [by people] who take me gratis as a first-rate, scintillating character, a genius, a handsome wit.
Robert Pratt-Barlow, known as Bobby, was the unlikely individual who more than anyone else established Alan. Born in 1885, he was in many ways a representative late Victorian. Outwardly he was correct to the point of stuffiness, as when he once refused to respond to someone in a hotel paging a telephone call for Mr Barlow: “My name is Pratt-Barlow.” He looked like Harold Nicolson, that is to say a stocky figure whose cheeks were pink and moustache whitish. Through his family’s interest in John Dickinson, the paper manufacturers, he had inherited a fortune. One friend was D. H. Lawrence, and the collection of his letters edited by Aldous Huxley ends with one to Bobby.
No sort of intellectual, he divided his time between living in Taormina in Sicily and going on extended travels. Quite often he seems unobservant. For instance, writing from Hamburg in August 1930, by which time Hitler and the Nazis were only some thirty months from taking power, all he had to say was that Germans “make the best use of the open air [and] know how to dress properly. They are healthy,