‘How extraordinary that you can tell me that,’ he remarked. ‘It really is extraordinary, because not a single one of his contemporaries would have known it. I didn’t know him well because he kept to himself. I don’t think anyone knew him well except Evelyn. I can say he was very good-looking in a delicate Pre-Raphaelite way and had the same sort of features as Evelyn liked in girls. The pixie look. He was not a hearty but he dressed like a hearty, in the country style, plus-fours and tweeds.’ Harold, also an Anglo-American, gave me a twinkly eye as he used that word ‘tweeds’, always his classic put-down.
‘And although Graham was rather quiet,’ he continued, ‘he drank like a fish. I believe the mother was part of the problem. She is portrayed in Evelyn’s story, Winner Takes All’. (This is Mrs Kent-Cumberland, another of Waugh’s Red Queen women. She is less amusing and nastier than Lady Circumference.)
‘Oh yes, he and Evelyn were always together,’ mused Harold with an odd smile. ‘An infatuation. And it went on for quite a few years. We hardly saw anything of Evelyn at that time. Oh, definitely an infatuation.’
Harold of course was in Brideshead Revisited too. He and Brian Howard were blended in ‘Anthony Blanche’, the aesthete of Christ Church. So momentarily – ha! – I was listening to Anthony Blanche’s sly complaint, sixty years after the event, that Sebastian Flyte had stolen the narrator Charles Ryder from him.
The Graham trail petered out. I lost interest. Until one day I found myself in Warwickshire, on the road between Leamington Spa and Stratford-upon-Avon. It was one of those spacious, wintry English days – bit cold, bit windy, bit wet – which combine pensive and tonic qualities. I noticed a sign which said ‘Barford’. It was a few moments before its significance registered – oh yes, Barford – Barford House was where Alastair had lived with his mother all those years ago – whereupon an inquisitiveness welled up strongly and I decided to turn off. Suddenly I wanted to see Graham’s boyhood home and the scene of Evelyn Waugh’s youthful imagination. I wanted to go back seventy years.
I’ve searched my annual diaries, which are for appointments (which I keep) and dates of parties (which I may or may not got to), and I’ve searched my journals which are sketchy not systematic, and simply cannot establish what year this was, the year of my fortuitous visit to Barford. But it must have been in the late nineteen-eighties. Certainly before the coming of the M40. Since my visit, the M40 extension has been constructed alongside the village and more or less seen off the place. But in the late 1980 s Barford, when finally I reached it via serpentine lanes, was still peaceful and at a distance from things. Barford House was on the edge of the village and the first surprise was that it wasn’t at all in the stately-home class and was quite close to the road. It was a substantial white stucco building embellished with Ionic half-columns on the front and a picturesque conservatory to the left. The second surprise was that like Brideshead Castle, and Castle Howard which was used in the television series, it had a dome and lantern on the roof above the centre, albeit on a modest scale. Waugh, who was passionate about architecture, would have registered everything.
It was 3.30 in the afternoon. Children were trailing home from school with satchels and rucksacks, but though near the roadway, the house was apart from such traffic, screened by a mature stand of evergreen trees. I hovered for a while at the entrance to the drive, hoping to see someone, but the house was lifeless, as though its heart stopped for ever when the Grahams and the Waughs of this world went away. No clue as to its present occupancy was discernible and, after the slap in New Quay, I was disinclined to knock, uninvited and unknown, on its front door (and I’ve never done so anywhere again!). But the visit to Barford did rekindle my interest in the fate of Alastair Graham. Perhaps now that he’d died, people would talk more freely.
At home in Notting Hill I took out the dusty file and browsed its contents. I thought I might as well quiz those two stalwarts of memory lane, Anthony Powell and Peter Quennell, and yes, they both remembered Graham from Oxford and like everyone else used the phrase ‘good-looking’ – ‘extremely good-looking,’ emphasised Powell, ‘with rather Dresden china shepherdess sort of looks.’ And also like everyone else who’d known him in the 1920 s, they knew nothing of his whereabouts since that time. I could see that Alastair Graham’s evanescence was part of his appeal and originality.
Selina Hastings came up with something solid: two surviving letters from Alastair to Evelyn. She thought there were no others but I managed to unearth a third – where from? Oh yes, Auberon Waugh copied it for me from the Waugh archive. All three are unpublished and undated but from the period 1922-25. The most evocative is the Burgundy letter sent from London in 1923 or 24, addressed to Waugh at Hertford College, Oxford. Enclosed with it is a photograph of Alastair standing naked on a rock with what appears to be a waterfall in the background. Whether Alastair himself put the photograph there, or Evelyn did later on, was uncertain (Bron said). It was one of the few things from this period that Waugh, despite the later virulence of his religion, couldn’t bear to destroy. The letter reads:
Saturday
My dear Evelyn,
I’m sending this down by David or the Bastard John, whom I’m seeing this evening. I am sad that you wouldn’t come up for this party. I am afraid it will be bloody. One can always drink but it is rather a cheap path to heaven. I’ve found the ideal way to drink Burgundy. You must take a peach and peal [sic] it, and put it in a finger bowl, and pour the Burgundy over it. The flavour is exquisite. And the peach seems to exaggerate that delightful happy Seraglio contentedness that old wine evokes. An old French lady taught it to me, who has a wonder-ful cellar at Lavalles. I’ve been in bed with pains in my ears for the last two days. May I go and call on your parents one day, or would they hate it? I do not know whether I ought to come to Oxford or not next week. It depends on money and other little complications. If I come, will you come and drink with me somewhere? on Saturday. If it is a nice day we might carry some bottles into a wood or some bucolic place, and drink like Horace. I’m afraid this is a poor wandering letter. But I cannot write letters. It was only meant to express my sorrow at your absence from this party. I wish you felt merrier, and were not so serious.
With love from Alastair, and his poor dead heart.
The tone of whimsy and sad sweetness is so exactly that of Sebastian Flyte that it is clearer than ever how much of Alastair’s stripling manner was the basis for that character. Not to mention the outing to drink ‘some bottles’ in the countryside – such an outing on a sunny summer’s day is the first magical set piece in Brideshead Revisited.
Another of the letters to Waugh, sent from The Bury, Offchurch, Leamington, probably in 1925, contains these telling lines:
…all the beautiful things that I have seen, heard or thought of, grow like bright flowers and musky herbs in a garden where I can enjoy their presence, and where I can sit in peace and banish the unpleasant things of life. A kind of fortified retreat that no one can enter except myself.
Both Narcissus and the recluse are glimpsed in these letters but of course narcissism and reclusiveness are profoundly linked: you can gaze into your pool only so long as you are undisturbed by others.
Alastair’s brief diplomatic foray was the most active period of his life and also marks the final phase with Waugh. It is, like everything else, largely unrecorded. But I scavenged every possible source – journals, letters, forgotten autobiographies – and feel reasonably confident in putting together the following.
He had begun to travel independently soon after leaving Oxford, partly to avoid his mother, partly to explore his sexuality. While homosexuality was illegal in England and America, the Mediterranean was the place for Anglo-Saxon gay men to escape to, and Tangier, Ibiza, Capri, Taormina, Florence, Rome, Mykonos, Tunis, the South of France, became enticing destinations largely on account of allowing misfits of all kinds to breathe more easily and be themselves. Germany provided a more specialised release for Auden and Isherwood, Egypt
and India for E. M. Forster, China for Harold Acton: the list could go on and on. Curiously the situation has now in many respects reversed. As the Anglo-Saxon world has developed a high degree of lifestyle diversity, people from other cultures, especially from the Islamic world, flock to it to escape the crushing conformism of their own societies. Yet the Mediterranean still retains its air of liberating, sensual sunshine. Waugh’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold (1957) is a thinly disguised account of his nervous breakdown and it is his most honest book. In it he calls the Mediterranean ‘that splendid enclosure which held all the world’s history and half the happiest memories of his own life; of work and rest and battle, of aesthetic adventure and of young love.’
Although I do not particularly feel a misfit myself, I’m not terribly excited by conventional company. I find people who don’t ‘fit in’ attractive and, on reflection, I discover that all my important lovers have been eccentric in some way. But in the fuller sense, everyone has their misfit aspect -philosophers have called it the human condition – and we are each of us embarked on an unpredictable journey. Is this especially true in our age of dislocation which some call globalisation? One could go further and suggest that ‘fitting in’ can seem like suffocation in the twenty-first century. The idea that one’s background (class, culture, language, country) is irrelevant is absurd, and yet increasing numbers of people do resent being detained or described by their origins in any way. So there is conflict, because the whole world is hung up on two lies: that we are all the same, that we are all different. But we were warned. At the root of Western literature is The Iliad which is about leaving one’s home to go out into the world and realise oneself in the battle of life. Only after, as a sequel, comes The Odyssey, the attempt to return, the wandering search for home once again – and hoping to recognise it when you find it. These great seminal books told us long ago: expect to be surprised by the human adventure, expect to be hurt, expect to be moved, upset, mirthful, angry; and give love, find love.
Alastair’s voyaging generally took him to ‘the Levant’, which to-day one thinks of as those lands on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. But in the nineteen-twenties the word might connote Greece, Crete, Cyprus, and also Malta which was the staging post for Tunis. The Levant was particularly fashionable at the time and one may ascribe this not only to Muslim bisexuality and to the adventures of Lawrence of Arabia during the Great War but also, in our more strictly literary circle, to E. M. Forster having introduced Cavafy to a British readership in Pharos and Pharillon (1923). Moving around the Levant in the 1920s were William Plomer, Steven Runciman, Robert Byron, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, David Talbot Rice and his wife Tamara. A group of them, including Alastair, had a riotous party in Istanbul 1933 on the night that Ataturk banned the wearing of the fez for men (he’d banned the wearing of the veil for women some years earlier).
It was Steven Runciman above all who made the area his own. He has written seductively of his youthful arrivals there on the Orient Express, taking the train from
Calais to Salonika to Istanbul, though he never so much as hinted at his amours (concerning which he was agonisingly bashful – his memoirs plumb new depths of sexlessness, although I did learn from them that Runciman had also been stormbound in Catania port for two days, on his grandfather’s yacht in 1924). When I was an undergraduate in 1968, I used the Orient Express on the same route as Runciman. By then it was on its last legs – or wheels – and would soon disappear altogether, but there was still an old Ottoman dining car attached which was enough to make one’s breakfast of rolls, goat’s cheese and coffee a highly romantic experience. As we steamed into Istanbul railway station, I remember looking out of the window and seeing a corpse beside the tracks partially obscured by windblown newspapers, and thinking ‘Ah, this is life!’
When Waugh arrived in Athens at Christmas 1926, Graham was established there in a modern flat with Leonard Bower, an attache at the British Embassy. Waugh wrote in his diary: ‘The flat is usually full of dreadful Dago youths called by heroic names such as Miltiades or Agamemnon with blue chins and greasy clothes who sleep with the English colony for 25 drachmas a night’.
Also with them in Athens was a man with a red beard who kept trying to seduce Alastair. In the published Waugh Diaries his name is given as R – . Thinking that this man might provide a further lead, I called the Humanities Research Centre at Austin in Texas where the Diaries are lodged. They really are terrifically on the ball in Texas – the relevant entry was read back to me over the phone. The man’s name turned out to be Arthur Reade and Waugh ‘used to meet him in my Great Ormond Street, 1917 Club days’. It didn’t mean anything at the time but I’ve now googled ‘Arthur Reade’. Very little. He’s called Britain’s first Trotskyist, and the 1917 Club was a Communist hangout in Gerrard Street, Soho, not Great Ormond Street. Has anyone else picked up on this flirtation of Waugh’s with Communism? Or am I the last to know?
I explored the Foreign Office papers at the Public Record Office because on February 20th 1928, Alastair became personal assistant to the British ambassador in Athens, Sir Percy Loraine. Presumably in consequence, he was not present at Waugh’s marriage to Evelyn Gardner in June of that year at St Paul’s, Portman Square. Or had Waugh actually not invited him? The occasion was hardly ‘a wedding’; no parents were there; Harold Acton was best man and generously paid for the lunch at Boulestin afterwards.
Waugh was impoverished but managed to cruise to the Levant in February 1929 on a travel book commission. His wife developed double pneumonia and went into hospital at Port Said where she almost died. Alastair, answering he said Waugh’s ‘pathetic cry for help’, arrived from Athens and gave Waugh £50. He often gave Waugh money and four years earlier, in 1925, had guaranteed Waugh’s overdraft – to Mrs Graham’s great displeasure. For two days Alastair and Evelyn did the low life of Port Said together and it was reported that the new Mrs Waugh resented being abandoned in favour of the former lover. One of the hallucinated voices in Pinfold raises the issue nearly thirty years later: ‘I want the truth, Pinfold. What were you doing in Egypt in 1929 ?’ Whatever it was, it can’t have been insuperable because Mr and Mrs Waugh followed Graham back to Greece for an interlude, and in May 1929 Waugh was writing to Henry Yorke from Istanbul that he and his wife had ‘fun at Athens with Mark & Alastair.’
When Sir Percy Loraine became British High Commissioner in Cairo, Alastair went along too, being appointed honorary attache at the Residency on September 2nd 1929. Technically a kingdom, Egypt had in effect been a British protectorate since 1883 (thus making Cecil Rhodes’s great dream come true: it was possible to travel the length of Africa, from Cape Town to Alexandria, without leaving British territory). Mark Ogilvie-Grant was appointed to a similar post on December 2nd. A third character, Vivian Cornelius, was appointed honorary attache on January 10th 1930. Ogilvie-Grant had his ‘appointment terminated’ in November 1932. Cornelius ‘resigned’ May 1933. Alastair had his ‘appointment terminated’ in December 1933. Again, all this information is from the Foreign Office papers. The phrase ‘appointment terminated’ is not necessarily ignominious. It was often applied to contract officers, as opposed to career diplomats, when their employment ended. It’s too late presumably to speak to Mr Cornelius about those days.
It was the following year, on May 13th 1934, that Alastair’s mother died. His father he had loved, and lost while still a teenager. His mother, who was richer than the father, he’d more or less detested but she’d been the only pressure on his life for action. With her gone he appears to have lost a drive and a shield. The drive he could do without; he had his inheritance. The shield he would replace by other means. And of course he no longer had to go abroad to escape her. One thing is clear: by this time Evelyn Waugh was no longer in Alastair’s life. The last notice I could trace of them together is at Pakenham Hall in Ireland, 1930 – Alastair talked of Abyssinia, sowing the seeds of Remote People and Black Mischief-although Waugh did write to Daphne Fielding in 1962 (year of
the first Beatles’ single!) that he hadn’t seen Alastair for twenty-five years which, if precise, would make their last meeting in 1937. But I don’t think Waugh was being precise; he was being vague.
Waugh’s horror of the banal, his need to make all events participate in his personal mythology, can lead to misrepresentations. Yet one of the most fascinating aspects of his genius is the transformation of facts into fictions. This tempering of his imagination by fact gives his work a rare quality of combining extravagance with leanness, always an irresistible combination. Perhaps I was wrong in my remark to Alastair Graham about Waugh’s work being undermined by his narrowing sympathies. Perhaps Waugh has the art to survive his own vileness and snobbery – because he was of course an artist. We should not make the mistake, which Waugh makes, of trying to judge him as a gentleman. And for Waugh, man and artist, Alastair Graham had by 1930 served his purpose.
There is a notion that having made grand connections at Oxford, Waugh’s life thereafter was replete with titles and great houses. This wasn’t so. In order to be at ease among the gratin he needed money and recognition as an artist and these did not come immediately. And it was only in the artier, more dysfunctional area of the upper class that he made his friends and was comfortable. The mainstream grandees of the peerage or the international set were not his territory. Diana Mitford, for example, said later that she was bewildered when Waugh suddenly broke off their close friendship in 1930 – she never realised that because she had become, as Diana Guinness, very rich and one of the most glamorous women in Europe, Waugh simply couldn’t cope.
Waugh’s essential move was to escape from his parents’ house in Golders Green. Which took a long time. He often returned to live with them from necessity – in 1935 he’s living there again. Meanwhile he adopted a series of alternative families. Waugh could not approach the aristocracy directly, especially when after Oxford he found himself teaching in second-rate schools for a pittance. He needed a less intimidating bridge, some middleground in which to groom his personality and manners, in which to learn without being overpowered.
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