Long after Harry and Vere had died and Alan had only memory to go on, he sketched their personalities, the detail and the tone calculated to expose their limitations. “My father is very much the colonel, with mouse-coloured hair and moustache, gold watch-chain – he considered wrist-watches, like suede shoes, and heaven knows, pocket-combs marks of the beast (an effeminate beast); my mother ran to strap shoes, mink capes, a regimental brooch in diamonds – the Coldstream of course – and sufficient but not obtrusive pearls … they were endlessly loving and unselfish, endlessly, also, at odds with reality.”
From 1931 onwards, Harry and Vere and Adrian abandoned Buckingham Palace Road to live in a grace and favour house in Windsor Castle, the second of the royal palaces in Cyril Connolly’s satire. This consisted of rooms set into the Henry VIII Gateway, the public entrance to the castle and built in Victorian Gothic style. This architecture dictated the strange asymmetrical interior of the house, all angles and niches and window-seats, a corridor poky and dark because so little light of day came in, and a staircase dangerously steep with virtually no light at all. A few feet outside the drawing room wall was a sentry box, and the day and the night were punctuated by the commands of the sergeant changing the guard, the hard smack of the guardsman on duty shouldering his rifle and then the clip of his boots on the cobbles as he marched the regulation number of paces in order to stay awake. In a final promotion that must have been close to his heart, Harry became Harbinger (a title of seniority) of the Gentlemen at Arms, a body of retired officers with ceremonial duties to perform for the royal household in resplendent uniforms complete with a plumed helmet and sword evoking another age.
In the course of the war my grandfather took me with him to Buckingham Palace where he was to receive the Order of the Bath. Many of the men awarded medals that day had been carried on stretchers into what seemed to me then an immense hall. Nurses attended some of those most wounded and bandaged. King George VI moved among them, a slender figure in a naval uniform. His features were sleek, sharp-boned like a whippet’s. He patted me on the head and said that there was a lot to see of interest in the big rooms of the palace.
On the day the war ended, Harry showed me the copy of The Times with the Six List printed in full. Dr Franz Six was the Gestapo official charged with drawing up the list of Englishmen to be shot out of hand immediately after a victorious German invasion. There was Alan’s name, and in brackets after it Tätig Kreis Petschek, Active in the Petschek circle. The Petscheks were Czech industrialists and anti-Nazis who had saved their holdings from expropriation by the simple expedient of transferring ownership to trusts in neutral South America. (Sharing the honour to be on the Dr Six list is Clarissa’s grandfather, Sir George Barstow, chairman of the Prudential.)
On a Sunday while I was at Eton I would try to finish the compulsory extra work on some scriptural subject in time to have tea with the grandparents in Windsor Castle. A secret entrance led from the High Street to the so-called Hundred Steps and steeply up an embankment to cloisters and St George’s Chapel. Inside is the white marble effigy on the tomb of the Prince Imperial, Napoleon III’s son. Corresponding to the blow that had killed him in the Zulu wars, a black stain appeared on its cheek, returning no matter how often it was scrubbed away. My grandfather liked to take me to check on a phenomenon that he was sure had no rational explanation. Sometimes we walked in the Great Park or used a special key that residents of the Castle were allowed for access to Frogmore with its mausoleum. Helplessly undomestic, Granny Vere neither shopped nor cooked. Mrs. Butler, the one and only pair of helping hands, did not come in at the weekend but would have prepared sandwiches and a Fuller’s chocolate cake. On one occasion when they had not been expecting me, I caught Harry eating cornflakes with water. They were saving money. One November afternoon with the Thames Valley mist gathering, I was playing football on one of the numerous distant pitches that were not so easy to locate. These insignificant games between junior house teams were compulsory, and nobody ever came to watch them. But there by the sideline was a solitary spectator perching on a shooting stick, my grandfather, wearing a heavy overcoat and his brown felt hat.
Eton in his time, Alan insists in his autobiography, “was not a very lively place.” Henry Yorke was his only creative contemporary, he said, except that on the very next page he contradicts himself, naming as friends at the school Peter Watson the future sponsor of Horizon, James Lees-Milne, A. J. Ayer, the bibliophile Jake Carter, and others equally successful. In the swim, Alan was free at last from the eccentricity of being kept backward for fear that he was too forward. The school used to publish what was called the Calendar, an alphabetical list of all the boys, and any who had won a prize was rewarded by a footnote recording it. Alan’s footnote was many lines longer than anyone else’s as year after year he had scooped all the prizes available for literature and music. His self-portrait as someone who couldn’t kick a football and wanted to leave the school as soon as could be is the cliché that aesthetes have cultivated to ensure that nobody mistakes them for hearties.
Besides, Alan never raised the possibility that I might go to some other school. My mother was not so sure. We had struggled round the London shops to buy the right clothes, including the Eton jacket, known as bum-freezer, worn by boys below a certain size. She had stayed up late sewing on name-tapes. My parents were due to accompany me on my first day at Eton. At Tonbridge station where we started the journey, Alan caught his hand in the train door, turned white and decided that he had to go home. Poppy called after him that he was the one who’d set his heart on sending me to this English school, she was a foreigner, she didn’t know the customs and couldn’t manage on her own. But of course she could, and did.
The Fourth of June is an Eton holiday when parents come to watch sporting events on the cricket pitch and the river in an atmosphere similar to Ascot races. On one of these occasions Alan and I were walking through the school when someone came up from behind and put his hands firmly over Alan’s eyes. You are a lower boy, this man began to intone in the school idiom, you are late for chapel, you will be punished with a week on tardy book, you have got a rip for your essay, you haven’t done your extra work, your tutor Mr Whitworth is extremely put out. This turned out to be Henry Yorke, whose first novel (writing as Henry Green) is set in the anagrammatic school of Note.
Cyril Connolly had more of a story to tell. In some ways he and Alan had much in common. His father was a regular army officer with the rank of major. In the background, relations with aristocratic titles were to be envied and emulated. “Why had my father not got a title?” was one of the questions to which Cyril wanted an answer. Enemies of Promise, published in 1938 when he was already thirty-five, is about self-discovery, and Alan acknowledged that he recognized in it “a more intelligent version of my own uncertainties.” Cyril was speaking for many in his generation who thought of themselves as writers. The ambition was to write a book that would hold good for ten years. Combining experience and imagination, fiction was self-evidently the highest form of literature. At Eton, Cyril had created a hothouse of romance with other boys in College. Nostalgic submersion in the memory of that past overpowered the practical difficulty of choosing a subject that could support the intended masterpiece, and then sitting down to write it. Masters of the false start, Cyril and Alan both amassed in their papers innumerable notebooks with one or two pages of writing and the rest expressively blank.
When we lived in Kent, Cyril came to the house, and his name is in the visitors’ book for the first time in 1943. He published in Horizon Alan’s account of postwar Vienna and also a short story that reads like another false start. It was in our house that Cyril hid a half-eaten plate of eggs and bacon in a drawer and left a chamber pot in the spare room for Poppy or Jessie to empty. He took no exercise, he let himself go, he waddled rather than walked, his face was fatty and colourless but with a redeeming gleam of humour in his eyes. I must have been at least twenty when I came to know him well, and by
then his affections, transferred to women, were as demanding as ever. At the peak of his Eton intoxication with literature and sexuality, he told me several times, a small boy had been fagged to bring him a note. This was Alan, and the note read, “Here he is.”
The chances were high that Alan would think his early life had been a strait-jacket from which he had to escape by whatever means there were. In 1926, he talked his way out of Eton and was allowed to spend that summer and autumn in France. As the train moved out of Victoria Station, he records unconsciously a family tableau in the diary that he now began to keep: “Mummy walks quickly besides, a little tearful and Daddy waves in the background.” The impatient departing schoolboy arrived in Paris as the fully-fledged adult he was to be for the rest of his life, just as a caterpillar emerges in the new unexpected form of a butterfly. In the Ritz Bar he met up with Lord Tredegar (writing as Evan Morgan), “dear darling Evan, whom I love more deeply every time I look at him,” and Hugh Lygon, the original of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, not to mention “a dear little German boy, Gustav. All the Queens were there.” Without introductions or preliminaries of any kind, suddenly this escaped schoolboy is in Touraine, the guest of hospitable French dukes and counts and their cosmopolitan neighbors, appreciating châteaux and possessions with the total confidence of a connoisseur.
That November, telegrams from Harry urgently recalled him to sit for his entrance examination to Oxford. Sir Herbert Warren, President of Magdalen College and a renowned snob, interviewed him and noted his testimonials: “I liked what I saw of him.” Going up to Oxford in October 1927, Alan wrote regularly to his parents. In Magdalen’s New Buildings (elegantly eighteenth-century in fact), he had “charming rooms, both panelled in a rather decadent cream-beige” which he had improved with a few alterations and the hiring of a piano. “I have five tutors but only very few lectures a week, so that I can easily do a few Newdigate poems.” He tells them about dinners with Peter Watson and Graham Eyres-Monsell and George Harwood, friends richer than him.
In his second term, he opens one of his letters, “Lest you think too badly of me, I enclose a chronicle of my late doings.” And chronicle it is, with names and places. On the back of one envelope is a scribble whose pay-off is in French, “I propose to have the Imperial Coronet stamped on my paper. Bel effet?” He has been to parties in houses as grand as West Wycombe and Sezincote. Cecil Beaton “walks like an exhausted pendulum,” his orbit getting smaller and smaller until it swings up more violently than ever. A leaving party for Lord Clonmore was followed by “a fancy dress dance for which I wore a ballet skirt and tights and ropes and ropes of Woolworth jewellery and had rather a success.”
John Betjeman also had rooms in New Buildings at the time. Summoned by Bells, his autobiography in verse, catches similar highlights of camp showing-off. (Kolkhorst was a university lecturer in Spanish, an eccentric, a Colonel in Betjeman’s imagination just as Alan was Bignose: “Dear private giggles of a private world,” as that poem has it.)
Alan Pryce-Jones came in a bathing-dress,
And, seated at your low harmonium,
Struck up the Kolkhorst Sunday-morning hymn
“There’s a home for Colonel Kolkhorst” – final verse
ff with all the stops out …
There Bignose plays the organ
And the pansies all sing flat …
In Alan’s old age, the university and the college used to appeal to him for donations as though he were the loyal alumnus that he made sure not to be.
He didn’t care for anyone or anything that made demands on him. At the end of February 1928 he told his parents, “All is exceedingly well between me and the Dean. The authorities are easily pacified, being by nature loving and utterly obtuse and before long I shall be President of the Junior Common Room and sink into an unparalleled depth of academic superiority. Seriously, don’t worry.” What he had sunk into was debt. Here was the first instance of an attitude that was to shape his life, that he could be as extravagant as he liked because somebody was bound to turn up and pay the bills. He knew it of himself of course. “If one can’t afford something the moment one wants it,” he wrote in his diary just three years later, on 24 May 1930, “one must just arrange for someone else to pay for it.” This time, Harry came to Magdalen and after a meeting with the college authorities signed the cheques without apparently demurring. Immediately afterwards, by way of imposing discipline, the Dean of the college gated him, meaning that he had to be in by nine o’clock at night. On that very same evening, Alan went in a white tie to a ball, was caught returning, and rusticated, that is sent down for the rest of the term, rather an indulgent punishment in the circumstances.
According to Alan, his father had no idea how to cope with him at this point, and could only say that there could be no question of returning to Magdalen. Alan was unemployable but could no longer live off his father, he could never marry, he had no future. But that same afternoon, Alan continues, fortuitously a friend contrived a meeting with J.C. Squire, editor since its inception in November 1919 of the The London Mercury, a monthly for those whose literary taste stopped well short of T. S. Eliot and The Criterion. Squire apparently had heard of the prizes Alan had won at Eton and offered him a job as assistant editor, to start the following Monday.
Harry and Vere and friends of theirs had long been sending out Alan’s poems in the hope of attracting attention. “Dear darling” Evan Tredegar was a writer whom they knew and they had introduced Alan to him. Writing on Times notepaper with the date 5 January 1926, that is to say well before Alan’s first term at Oxford, an acquaintance by the name of R. I. H. Shaw says that he has been talking about Alan to Bruce Richmond, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and also to A. P. Herbert. The latter thought that an approach to J.C. Squire was “excellent advise.” To meet him, “you have only to drop me a line.” Sure enough, ten days later Alan had an appointment at 4:30 in the afternoon with Squire.
Squire and The London Mercury, then, had been hovering in the wings for some time before Alan’s misadventure. A few weeks after his father had made it clear that rustication meant being sent down from Oxford, Alan returned to France. Cast in exaggerated self-congratulatory mode, a series of letters home begins on 5 June and gives no clue that there might have been family tension about his prospects. On entering France, trouble with the customs over his typewriter had left him “mentally a broken fountain with no drop of water” but this passed soon enough. He rejoiced to be starting his novel. “Harvest And The Ruin” was the title of one of the poems he posted to his parents, jotting on the typescript, “The thing is very fine.” On his behalf, a friend had approached J. L. Garvin, influential editor of The Observer, and Alan was critical for fear this might be seen as an embarrassing put-up job. Another contact led to Blanche Knopf, an eager talent-spotter and founder with her husband Alfred of the New York firm that still has their name. She asked to see what Alan had done so far, which he thought “impertinent,” even “damnable insolence!”
Three weeks later, on June 26, he sent a postcard from Montbazon in Touraine. “As for Sir Herbert Warren, I consider that the privileges of dotage can be carried too far. Boo to him!” Uncle Guy Dawnay had taken sides with Alan because, in Alan’s words, “He knows a genius when he sees one. I have just finished the first section of my novel…. I have written a very remarkable poem. I am a Clever Young Man!” In the margin a caricature of himself thumbing his nose at Sir Herbert illustrated his feeling. By July 5 he was informing them that he had written 1,617 words more of the novel. “Bless you, poppets,” he addressed them, ending with spoof signatures, C. B. Cochrane, A.A. Milne, Noël Coward, and Queen Mary.
“For Ever Grey” is the title of another poem sent home on August 11. The opening lines are:
Nothing is sad this morning, nothing grieves,
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.
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