by Philip Eade
* * *
By the autumn term of 1921 Evelyn was well and truly tired of Lancing, yet typically he used his low spirits creatively, filling the school magazine with what he later described as ‘preposterous manifestos of disillusionment’71 and founding the Corpse Club ‘for people who are bored stiff’.72 Members were required to wear black silk tassels in their buttonholes, wrote to each other on mourning notepaper and whenever a new one was elected, Evelyn as self-appointed ‘Undertaker’ would announce that ‘The Undertaker finds a mournful pleasure in announcing the interment of the late Mr …’73
The one bright spot was the prospect of going to Oxford, so besides his various official jobs Evelyn was busy cramming ‘like hell’ for a history scholarship. He took the precaution of writing to Arthur to tell him how ‘very repugnant’ he found the idea of staying on another term at Lancing and that in case he failed to get a scholarship he was prepared to go up to Oxford ‘on a minimum wage’. Mindful of the trouble his son might cause if he stood in his way, Arthur promptly consented to his leaving that term and either going straight to Oxford or to France.74 Evelyn was greatly relieved. ‘I should have only stagnated and fallen in love with some underschool if I had stayed on,’75 he wrote in his diary. A week later, however, he was still fretting that he was ‘open to fall in love with someone’, that ‘people like Onslow and Kimmerling interest me too much’ and that ‘I shall have to take care if I want to leave with credit and self-respect’.76
In early December Evelyn travelled to Oxford to sit the scholarship exams, accompanied by his friend Preters Molson, who sought to galvanise himself with a dash of strychnine but to no avail. The other candidates struck Evelyn as ‘absolute oiks but monstrously intellectual’,77 nonetheless it proved to be ‘a week of pure euphoria’, staying in a hotel for the first time on his own and being well looked after by Lancing old boys who had gone up to Oxford before them. The general paper, in particular, he ‘simply loved’, writing at length about the Pre-Raphaelites and Arthur Symons’s Life of Beardsley, and afterwards he felt confident that he had done well. The next week two letters arrived at Lancing, one to say that he had won the £100 Hertford College open history scholarship, another from his prospective tutor C. R. M. F. Cruttwell congratulating him on his ‘extremely promising’ work, saying he had been especially impressed by his general paper, his question on the Reformation in English history, and above all by his English prose style which was ‘about the best of any of the candidates in the group’.78
The next day, after saying his goodbyes and arranging for his successors to take on the school magazine, debating society and library, Evelyn caught the late train to Ditchling, leaving Lancing for good. ‘I am sure I have left at the right time,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘as early as possible and with success.’79
* Driberg was never an especially reliable witness, however he later vehemently denied this particular story (Francis Wheen, Tom Driberg, pp. 28–9).
† W. E. Capel Cure later modelled his career on Roxburgh, becoming a master at Stowe after graduating from Cambridge and J. F.’s closest personal confidant. Like J. F. he remained a bachelor. He died of cancer in 1953. See Annan, Roxburgh of Stowe, pp. 50, 196–7.
* Driberg (later Lord Bradwell) was the first person in public life to be described as a homosexual in a Times obituary. His entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography records that as an adult he ‘had a consuming passion for fellating handsome, lean, intelligent working-class toughs … his sexual prowling never abated’.
6
All That One Dreams
Arthur was delighted with his son’s achievement and brazenly basked in the glory that he felt reflected on himself. ‘Thank you, my dear Boy,’ he wrote as Evelyn made his way back to Underhill, ‘for the honour & happiness you have brought to your home. May the future be worthy of this beginning.’ With possibly unintended condescension, he added that next to New College (his old college), whose scholarships Evelyn had thought unduly competitive, he too would have chosen Hertford. ‘It is a small but thoroughly good college, and the emoluments are the best on the list.’1 The £100-a-year emoluments provided by Evelyn’s scholarship were especially welcome for Arthur who, like most British publishers, was far worse off than he had been ten years previously and had been worrying even more than usual since the expiry of the Dickens copyright in 1920, which left a large hole in Chapman & Hall’s income.2
Evelyn’s headmaster, meanwhile, was relieved no longer to have to deal with the boy’s restlessness at school. ‘He had begun to grate at his surroundings,’ wrote Bowlby in his final report, ‘and the friction was bad for him & threw out sparks which made little fires in some of the characters about him, partly no doubt kindling, but partly destructive! For all his brilliance he is curiously young and out of touch with reality. But he is looking for it and if he will search diligently & humbly & be content with some beaten tracks, instead of wanting to make a new road every time, he will find it – and himself.’ If Evelyn found that patronising, Roxburgh’s report was more straightforwardly favourable: ‘His work has great merit and is sometimes really brilliant. I think he has quite unusual ability and a real gift for writing. We shall hear of him again.’3
Privately, Roxburgh rebuked him for having spread the ‘contagion of disillusionment’4 in his last term at school, however Evelyn assured Dudley Carew that he was now ‘pretty full of beans’5 at the prospect of going to Oxford so soon. Whereas at Lancing he had felt apprehensive and resentful to be starting in the middle of the academic year, this time he was excited to be going to university as ‘a lone explorer’.6
When he arrived in January 1922, Hertford’s best rooms had all been taken by the Michaelmas freshers, so for his first two terms he made do with a poky set over the JCR buttery from where the smell of anchovy toast wafted up each afternoon.7 Here he lived not unlike Paul Pennyfeather or Charles Ryder before he met Sebastian Flyte, in a typical freshman’s tangle of emotions. ‘I am very shy and a little lonely still but gradually settling down,’ he wrote to Carew a few weeks into his first term. ‘I wish I could find some congenial friends.’8
To begin with he saw a lot of his old Lancing cronies: Max Mallowan, Rupert Fremlin, James Hill and Preters Molson – who was not yet up but being coached for another attempt at a New College scholarship, which he eventually achieved at the third go. It was with the pleasure-seeking Preters (and Hill) that Evelyn got drunk for the first time, polishing off three-quarters of a bottle of Madeira, a glass of port and two tumblers of cider and then loudly reciting Newbolt in the quad – all ‘very pleasant’, he told Tom Driberg afterwards. ‘I don’t feel the least ill after it.’9
For Evelyn, the effect of drink mattered far more than the taste of it. Besides being another way of going against the grain at a time when the political mood in Britain seemed to favour introducing Prohibition, getting drunk offered the perfect means of conquering his shyness and broadening his social range. According to a friend at Hertford, ‘he drank to get into a world that was not his world’.10 By Evelyn’s own account most of his Oxford friendships were forged while drunk and he was fervent in preaching the benefits of intoxication.11 ‘Do let me seriously advise you to take to drink,’ he urged Driberg. ‘There is nothing like the aesthetic pleasure of being drunk and if you do it in the right way you can avoid being ill the next day. That is the greatest thing Oxford has to teach.’12
Driberg was still at Lancing and, despite Evelyn’s avowed euphoria at having left, at lonelier moments during his first Oxford term his thoughts still drifted back to his old school. To Dudley Carew, who also remained there, he affected disdain at the idea of keeping up with the past yet admitted that he was ‘vain enough’ to want to know what was said of him now that he had left: ‘I imagine I am pretty well disliked now as good God I deserved to be. [But] I am changing pretty hard and I think for the better …’13 He also could not resist writing the odd piece for the school magazine, including a robust reply (unde
r the pseudonym Lavernia Scargill) to a conceited critic of the Corpse Club.
At Oxford, for the time being at least, he remained relatively unobtrusive. He learned to smoke a pipe and to ride a bicycle and went for long walks around the surrounding villages, bounding along with his stubby oak walking stick. He bought a cigarette box engraved with the Hertford College arms and a printed panorama of Oxford, and even played the odd game of hockey, relishing its ‘pleasant old world violence’. More ominously, he had begun to spend money with reckless abandon and later explained to his cousin Claud Cockburn that he ‘kept the creditors quiet in the traditional Oxonian manner of the day by simply ordering more and more goods’.14 He never went to chapel, did not frequent the lecture room and read almost no history despite his tutor’s exasperated demands: ‘Damn you, you’re a scholar!’15
Evelyn found ample time for other books, however, among which he particularly admired Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which he famously alludes to in Brideshead when Charles Ryder sets off for lunch with Sebastian for the first time: ‘I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.’
Equivalent glimpses of Wonderland had beckoned for Evelyn when, as a timid fresher feeling cut off from the best of what Oxford had to offer, he began to make friends with a wild, dishevelled ‘second-year man’ at Hertford called Terence Greenidge. In the prevailing Oxford parlance, Greenidge was ‘a zany’16 or, as Harold Acton described him, ‘a dear, charming loony’.17 His foibles included a mania for picking litter off Oxford pavements and stuffing it in his pockets, and a habit of pinching small items belonging to others – hairbrushes, nail scissors, keys and so forth – and hiding them behind books in the library.
Yet it was in Greenidge’s rooms that Evelyn met the president of the Union and the editor of The Isis, introductions which in turn quickly led to his speaking at the Union and contributing to the magazine. Given the zeal with which he had taken to drinking, it was apt that Evelyn’s maiden Union speech in early February 192218 should oppose a motion calling for Prohibition, although with characteristic contrariness within a few months he spoke in favour of it, saying he was a Conservative and that Prohibition ought to be a Conservative principle.* Oxford Magazine recorded the ‘good impression’ he made in his first debate,19 however Evelyn readily conceded that he had no talent for oratory and was quite unable to assume the appropriately grave tone for the debates, besides which he was far too ignorant of the politics and current affairs that were routinely discussed.†
Perhaps more influentially, Greenidge launched Evelyn’s Oxford social life and accelerated his descent into drunkenness by introducing him to the Hypocrites’ Club (motto: ‘water is best’), the much-mythologised dive on St Aldate’s which was then in the process of being taken over by a band of hedonistic Old Etonians. Evelyn found the riotous and self-consciously childish atmosphere there immediately congenial and later described the Hypocrites’ as ‘the stamping ground of half my Oxford life and the source of friendships still warm today’.20
Many of these friendships had a pronounced homosexual flavour, not that there was anything especially unusual about that at that time. As John Betjeman later remembered, ‘Everyone was queer at Oxford in those days!’21 According to Terence Greenidge, himself an active homosexual, ‘the attraction of man for man’ was apparent well beyond the Aesthete set that Evelyn befriended at the Hypocrites’. Greenidge claimed to have witnessed ‘many a hearty “blind”, even in Athletic Magdalen, where the behaviour of the most unlikely people showed evidence of tender feeling’. The cox ‘of a very sporting college’ also told him stories about the private lives ‘of the crews whom he used to steer so well, and they were remarkable stories’.22
If Evelyn had been sexually repressed at Lancing, here at Oxford he at last felt able to shed his inhibitions, emboldened as much by the overtly camp and licentious atmosphere as he was by the drink. When Anthony Powell first saw him at the Hypocrites’ he was sitting on Christopher Hollis’s knee, and when Tom Driberg came for his scholarship exam he and Evelyn enjoyed ‘some lively and drunken revels (“orgies” were they?), mainly homosexual in character: I remember dancing with John F, while Evelyn and another rolled on the sofa with (as one of them said later) their “tongues licking each other’s tonsils”‘.23 (Perhaps not surprisingly, Driberg was unsuccessful in that scholarship attempt.) His friend and biographer Christopher Sykes averred that Evelyn frankly admitted to having passed through ‘an extreme homosexual phase’ while at Oxford, which ‘for the short time it lasted, was unrestrained, emotionally and physically’.24
* * *
Towards the end of his first term, Evelyn wrote to tell Carew that Oxford was ‘all that one dreams’.25 In the summer term it got even better. ‘Life here is very beautiful,’ he wrote to Driberg in May. ‘Mayonnaise and punts and cider cup all day long. One loses all ambition to be an intellectual.’26
A week before the holidays began, Evelyn again wrote to Driberg asking him to be kind to the brother ‘of a friend of mine here called Pares’ who was due to start at Lancing the next term. ‘As far as I can gather he is a fragile & sensitive flower. If he is anything like his brother, he is also abnormally clever.’27
The friend was Richard Pares, widely admired among Oxford undergraduates for his bright blue eyes, flax-gold hair and, as A. L. Rowse wistfully remembered, ‘red kissable lips’. Rowse admitted to having fallen victim himself to Pares’s ‘charm and desperation’,28 while Evelyn’s later rival for Pares’s affections, Cyril Connolly, beheld ‘the look of a Rossetti angel with a touch of Mick Jagger’.29
According to Christopher Hollis, who remained a lifelong friend, Evelyn’s homosexuality at Oxford represented a passing phase at a time when girls were in short supply and strictly chaperoned. Yet while the phase lasted there were at least two intense relationships, and the first of these was with Pares, ‘my first homosexual love’, as Evelyn later described him to Nancy Mitford.30 A year older than Evelyn, Pares had come up to Oxford from Winchester the term before him, in the autumn of 1921. A history scholar at Balliol and a future Fellow of All Souls, he was certainly abnormally clever, however he was also strangely submissive. Years later Hollis recalled that Pares had ‘become a complete prostitute more from obligingness than anything else’;31 or as Harold Acton observed, ‘My de-ar, he lends his body.’32 His timid acquiescence was possibly a legacy of his troubled relationship with his father, the celebrated but emotionally wintery Russian expert, Sir Bernard Pares, who was ‘responsible for much family unhappiness’ according to Rowse. In any event, Richard was a nervous, delicate child.
Much of the attention he attracted at Winchester had been unwelcome – he ‘hated being pursued by buggers’, as Rowse robustly recorded33 – however there was apparently at least one love interest before Evelyn. ‘I have been inwardly faithful to one boy for more than two years,’ he told Evelyn, ‘and he is only dispossest this morning and by you, so I think I shall be constant to you for three years and then turn Papist. How much I shall have to confess depends on you.’34
Having begun sometime during Evelyn’s first year – possibly during his first term – their affair seems to have peaked around Christmas 1922.* In a letter to Evelyn written during that vacation from his home in Surbiton, Pares declared himself ‘tired of pretending not to be in love with you, which I have done intermittently since the fourth week of last term’. It was ‘impossible not to be level-headed after receiving a letter from you, for the bare receipt of it plunges me precipitously into sentimentality which increases in geometrical progression the first five times I read the letter through … Thoughts of me in bed? O Come.’35
In the same letter, Pares wrote that his ‘only fear of writing love-letters to you is that they might
come to be read out in court like those of Mrs Thompson, and the counsel for the defence would say it was one of the greatest love-affairs of history – which it is – and the Judge would say it was a guilty passion – which also it is’. Edith Thompson was a young Essex housewife who was then awaiting execution for conspiring with her young lover to murder her husband. The allusion adds to the impression that Evelyn and Pares’s love affair was more momentous than is often suggested.
Rowse, a notoriously inaccurate gossip, later described it as ‘a very intense adolescent affair’ and hazarded that Evelyn would have been the more active, masculine partner, Pares more passive and feminine. Pares himself confided to Rowse that he had never before experienced anything like it. It was, wrote Rowse, ‘Pares’s great love affair’ and ‘they were inseparable in Evelyn’s first year’.36 Pares was passionate about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which may help to explain why it became such a favourite narrative template for Evelyn in his future fiction.
Theirs was an attraction of opposites. Besides his intellect – far more academic than Evelyn’s – Pares was renowned for his puritanical self-discipline, yet according to another great friend, Isaiah Berlin, who regarded Pares as ‘the best and most admirable man I have ever known’, he ‘needed, and was sustained by, the greater vitality of others, and rewarded it with grateful and lasting affection’.37 But if he was attracted by Evelyn’s fizzing energy, Pares was equally repelled by his heavy drinking. ‘I loved him dearly,’ wrote Evelyn, ‘but an excess of wine nauseated him and this made an insurmountable barrier between us. When I felt most intimate, he felt queasy.’38