“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, unhypocritical and constructive…. What a difference between now and before the war.”
A Coldstreamer in the First War, Bobby had become a family friend through Harry and Guy and Alan Dawnay, brother officers. When the latter committed suicide in 1938, Bobby wrote to Vere: “I loved him more than anyone I have ever known, and for all that time I have always wondered why…. When he decided to get married, I thought the bottom of my life had fallen out, so conceited was I, I imagined that no one understood him like I did.” He repeated himself to Alan, first saying, “You have certainly done wonders for me,” and going on, “As for Uncle Alan why I loved him so I don’t know. From the first moment I saw him from another table in Magdalen Hall, I knew something of a most remarkable kind had entered my life.”
Bobby was my godfather and in my last year at Eton he told Alan that he wanted to meet me at last. Stromboli was belching fire and smoke as we flew past it, and the pilot took the plane down and circled so that we could all have a good look. It would not have been in Alan’s character to provide some preliminary sketch of Bobby; he took life as he found it and expected everyone else to do so as well. His diary entry for 27 January 1930 calls Bobby “kind, supportive and discreet,” which was true as far as it went. In his memoirs written long after Bobby was dead, he resorted to particularly arch phrasing to dress up the facts presentably. His father and uncles ragged Bobby aff
ectionately, as Alan puts it, “for was he not musical – a word which around 1910 also served as a euphemism for homosexual.” He also tried to close the subject: “At no time did his private life impinge on mine.”
Casa Rosa, Bobby’s house, was in the centre of Taormina, a compound around a courtyard. Painted outside a soft rosered shade, the interior walls were embellished with ceramic tiles. The butler was a boy of about twelve. In the kitchen were other boys of that age, all of them in shorts, some without shirts, introduced as the cooks. I spoke Italian too badly to ask them urgent personal questions now in need of an answer. Arriving at Eton, all new boys had to congregate in the school library to listen to Robert Birley, the headmaster, lecture on sexuality. Whatever he had to say was pitched at a level so high-flown that none of us could understand what he was talking about. At about that same time, Alan had given me advice, “Sex is like salade niçoise, you should try everything once.” I had already gone to bed when Bobby came into the room to give me a book, which he said he wanted me to read. He went out of the room immediately. I was left holding one of Krafft-Ebing’s works discussing sexual practices most of which I had never heard of before, and some of which I have never heard of since.
Next morning the whole household, at least ten strong, set off on a train of donkeys for Bobby’s country house at Mufarbi, the village higher than all others on Mount Etna. Here was a Sicilian version of the classic English pattern of leaving town to spend the weekend in the country. Aubrey Menen’s novel The Duke of Gallodoro, published in 1952, is an amusing send-up of Bobby and these boys, leaving open who exactly is exploiting whom. (Scandal and gossip spread far and wide. Letizia Fortini’s novel in 1987, Esilio e morte di Robert Fox Lambert, has an English upper-class protagonist and a Sicilian boy copied in close detail from original models in Casa Rosa, but by then Bobby was dead.) The donkey ride lasted three hours. The little boys in their shorts constantly laughed and sang. Little had changed in the property at Mufarbi since it had belonged to a contadino. There was a pergola, vines, lemon trees, and drifting up into the sky above our heads the smoke-and-fire eruptions of a volcano outdoing Stromboli. Krafft-Ebing and his book were never mentioned again.
At the beginning of 1930, Bobby and Alan set off on a prolonged journey to the Middle East. Harry and Vere appear to have had no reservations about it, and paid for some of Alan’s expenses. The Spring Journey, Alan’s first book, offers no particular point of view. Alan wrote as a tourist interested in his own reflections rather than a traveler interested in other people in other countries. Attached to the pages like so many credentials are allusions to writers and books, Muntaner, Mallarmé, Julien Benda, Balzac, The Book of Nonsense, George Stephens’s Incidents of Travel (1838), De la Motte Fouqué, Seneca, Trebellius Pollio, and many more. Now and then a phrase testifies to adventure with language: “Like a gong she returned one note, however hard she was hit.”
Egypt was then under British rule, and fashionable Europeans spent the winter there. In common with such visitors, Bobby and Alan did the round of Shepheard’s Hotel, the Pyramids, camel rides to a Coptic monastery, snake charmers, and boats on the Nile. Cairo, they found, was “appalling,” and Tutankhamen’s tomb a “disappointment.” For the month of February Bobby rented the Villa Bella Donna in Luxor. In control of events and movements, and also the paymaster, Bobby nonetheless does not feature in Spring Journey. In letters home and his diary Alan has bright descriptions of other people in Luxor, for instance Robert Hichens, author of The Green Carnation, the famous singer Dame Nellie Melba, the Queen of Romania, and Marthe Letellier, once flattered as the most beautiful woman in France. Personalities of the kind were hardly suitable material for the travel book Alan had in mind. Back in London was Patrick Kinross, a friend then at the outset of a comparable literary and sexual career, and he would have relished Alan’s letter of 25 February about goings-on in Luxor: “The most extraordinary thing, however, is the gaiety, the bedworthiness of every inhabitant. One can’t go behind any bush without giving embarrassment to somebody – twice I have found my dragoman in my bed of an evening, and that’s not the half.” This too did not find its way into the book.
One encounter, though, was destined to have repercussions. Staying in the grand Winter Palace Hotel were Paul Goldschmidt and Frank Wooster, the sort of friends that Bobby made it his business to have. At that point, Alan could not have appreciated the complexities of Frank’s emotional life. In the three years since Eugène Fould-Springer had died, the widowed Mitzi had come to the conviction that she could not have betrayed him by falling in love with Frank because what had happened was God’s work. Frank had to devise some way of reconciling this absolution of hers with the sexual relationship he had had with Eugène, while also weighing the future security that Mitzi’s fortune might bring him. Escaping to Egypt with his long-standing lover Paul Goldschmidt, he was two-timing Mitzi just ten months before he finally gave way and married her. Frank Wooster, Alan observed, after tea in the Winter Palace, “is a kind middle-aged man, with a face which looks as though he might have cancer – pale and with large bright blue eyes which seem added to his face from outside. The shape of his head is good – of his conversation less so, being of that kind of archness which is chiefly about bracelets.” And then, “Paul Goldschmidt is an elderly person who pays – a very sweet, rather pathetic figure.”
(Bobby of course followed every twist and turn in the Mitzi-Eugène-Frank triangular relationship. On 14 September 1932 Mitzi and Frank went to the Bayreuth festival and Bobby came over from the hotel in Berchtesgaden where he was staying – a few weeks later Hitler was to seize power in Berlin, and a few weeks later still Mitzi and Frank were to marry in London. In 1935 when they were all three together in Salzburg, Bobby asked Frank what he would have done in Eugène’s place when he realized Mitzi’s feelings for him. “More energetic,” was Frank’s answer. Then she asked what Frank meant by this, and heard a skilful put-down: “If you had been mine, you would never have missed tenderness or love or understanding, you would never have needed what I have been to you.”)
Before moving on from Luxor to Jerusalem, Bobby put in a preliminary report to Harry and Vere.
I really think Alan is enjoying himself. I certainly am, and am finding him a most delightful companion, as you said I would. Also he is working quite a lot, scribbles away at something every day…. Yesterday was dispatched a long poem to Brian Howard for some paper or other…. I don’t find Alan unmethodical and I am sure he is ambitious … and although he excels at so many things, he never pushes himself forward in anyway, a good trait this. He is also very nice and considerate to me.
At that moment, the gathering confrontation between Jews and Arabs in the British Mandate of Palestine could still have gone some other way. Colonial officials, High Commissioners, local governors and Palestine policemen have recorded the politics and practices then in place. Among journalists, Vincent Sheean or Arthur Koestler wrote immediate reportage that stands the test of time, but no book captures the human dimension, the atmosphere as the old Ottoman past was giving way to the fraught present. Alan lacked the experience or the interest for this; he did no interviews and quotes nobody. He spent his time in Jerusalem. Apart from a brief excursion to Nazareth, he saw nothing else of the country, not even Tel Aviv, and so trapped himself in stereotype observations: “This is the most violent country on our globe.” Or again: “The Government is accused of favouring Jews, but is actually pro-Arab. In fact, disliking the Jews seems the only common factor.” Jerusalem, he held, is always primarily an Arab city, “or perhaps it is true to say that it is never a Jewish city.” For the most part, he could see nothing good about any of the inhabitants. He confesses, “I could never prevent myself watching the Arabs as a curiosity.” Lack of engagement forces him into phrase-making, for instance speaking of “the iron-tasting miasma which hangs round an Arab,” whatever that might mean. Jews were also curiosities: “Sometimes an old Shylock is fine to look at.”
A
mman was horrible, so violently anti-British that “we were a little afraid of having our noses pulled in the streets.” In a letter to his parents he says that he and Bobby were too overwhelmed by the “unpleasantness” of Damascus to want to stay there, but also enclosed in the envelope a photograph of himself in the nude. On April 18 in the Hotel Continentale in Beirut Bobby wrote to Harry and Vere what sounds like a deliberately bland end-of-term summary. Alan “continues to be a most charming, entertaining and considerate companion.” Next day in the same hotel Alan adopted the same tone to his parents. A perfect companion, Bobby was “always cheerful and extremely amusing, very sensible and competent … among his personal luggage is always a large pillow, a marble ash-tray, a strainer, a waste-paper basket and a new box of chocolate biscuits…. We have decided to settle in Cyprus. Bobby is going to have a small but expensive castle.”
Cyprus, Rhodes, Delos, then Athens where he refused to rave over the Parthenon and where instead “the debauch of my nights ruined my days.” Munich, Budapest, Vienna. Once he was back in Europe, his sense of superiority modified though it did not disappear. For the immense sum of a thousand pounds Bobby had bought a new model Mercedes and Alan liked to go alone in it as much as possible. He shared Bobby’s fantasy about the Germans. “I certainly have the greatest admiration for the German way of life…. I suppose they are far more go-ahead than anyone else in Europe, and I am sure that it is largely because they have learnt not to be self-conscious when they haven’t got any clothes on … everyone is interested in any new subject from internal combustion to Braque. Nothing could be more stimulating than to talk to such ready and individual creatures.”
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